Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone.

BALDWIN, James.

$8,500.00

Item Number: 129588

New York: The Dial Press, 1968.

First edition of this major work by Baldwin. Octavo, original half cloth. Association copy, inscribed by the author on the half-title page, “For Leonard Lyons: with much affection, and respect. Jim Baldwin.” The recipient, Leonard Lyons was a noted American newspaper columnist, best known for his New York Post column “The Lyons Den”, which appeared 6 days a week beginning in 1934 and covered theater, movies, politics and art. Baldwin was often featured in the column, most famously in an article published shortly after Martin Luther King’s assassination relating an incident in which Baldwin ran into Lyons on the street and remarked that we would “never again be able to wear the suit he wore to the King funeral.” Shortly after the article was published, Baldwin received a phone call from his best friend from junior high school who despaired that “he could not afford to have suits in his closet which he didn’t wear”. Baldwin then arranged to meet his childhood friend in Harlem where he gifted him the suit, an experience he later wrote about and was included in his collections ‘The Price of the Ticket’ and ‘No Name in the Street’. Near fine in a near fine dust jacket. Jacket design by Paul Bacon. An exceptional association.

At the height of his theatrical career, actor Leo Proudhammer is nearly felled by a heart attack. As he hovers between life and death, Baldwin shows the choices that have made him enviably famous and terrifyingly vulnerable. For between Leo's childhood on the streets of Harlem and his arrival into the intoxicating world of the theater lies a wilderness of desire and loss, shame and rage. An adored older brother vanishes into prison. There are love affairs with a white woman and a younger black man, each of whom will make irresistible claims on Leo's loyalty. And, everywhere, there is the anguish of being black in a society that at times seems poised on the brink of total racial war.