Just Above My Head.

BALDWIN, James.

$6,500.00

Item Number: 129068

New York: The Dial Press, 1979.

First edition of the last novel published in Baldwin’s lifetime. Octavo, original cloth. Association copy, inscribed by the author on the dedication page, “for my beloved David Adams Leeming: Godspeed. Jimmy Baldwin.” The recipient, literary scholar David Adams Leeming, and Baldwin were close friends for twenty-five years. Leeming published his James Baldwin: A Biography in 1994, a vivid and intimate portrait of Baldwin, his complexities, and importance in the literary canon. Near fine in a near fine dust jacket. Jacket design by Jack Ribik. An exceptional association.

Baldwin's epic novel of intertwined families, spanning three decades, "is the work of a born storyteller at the height of his powers, a man who, now that he is older and more mature, has truly come into his own. As the most celebrated black American novelist, Baldwin has given his readers a comprehensive and comprehending examination of race and sexuality and suggested some of the ways in which the politics of color can shape the transactions of love" (Washington Post). "It seems impossible for Baldwin to write with anything other than eloquence. His great and peculiar power is to recreate the maddening halfway house that the black man finds himself in late-20th-century America" (New Yorker). In an interview given just before publication of this work, his last novel published in his lifetime, Baldwin observed that he was able to "finally come full circle. From Go Tell It on the Mountain to Just Above My Head sums up something of my experience—it's difficult to articulate —that sets me free to go someplace else" (New York Times).