Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son.

BALDWIN, James.

$12,500.00

Item Number: 133249

New York: The Dial Press, 1961.

First edition of Baldwin’s second major book of essays, featuring his powerful analyses of the politics of race and his controversial three-part essay on Richard Wright. Octavo, original half cloth. Association copy, inscribed by the author on the dedication page, “For Morris Milgram: My ally & friend, with the prayer that we’ll keep on fighting. Jimmy B. -& sooner or later, we’ll win.” The recipient, Morris Milgram was a civil rights advocate and fair housing developer, who fought for integrated housing across the United States following World War II. In 1954, Milgram built the earliest racially integrated private housing community in the United States, Concord Park, in Trevose, Pennsylvania, north of Philadelphia. The following year, in 1955, Milgram developed Greenbelt Knoll in the Holmesburg neighborhood of Northeast Philadelphia, the first planned racially integrated community in the city. Greenbelt Knoll was designated an historic district by the Philadelphia Historic Commission in 2006 upon its 60th anniversary. In 1968, Milgram became the first recipient of the National Human Rights Award from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. In his lifetime Milgram was instrumental in developing and managing housing for some 20,000 people in the Philadelphia area, as well as in Boston, Chicago, California, and Virginia. Near fine in a near fine price-clipped dust jacket. Jacket design by Robert Jonas. Photograph by Roy Hyrkin. An exceptional association linking Baldwin, one of America’s most incisive writers and Milgram, one of the leading civil rights advocate and fair housing developer, one of the finest possible.

"As the son of a preacher man, the grandson of a slave, and a witness to America, Baldwin's voice continues to cry out" (Field, Historical Guide, 9). This collection of 13 essays, written from 1954-1961, speaks to the "years in which Baldwin faced the question of identity… It is this theme of the 'graver questions of self,' questions of the inner effects of racism and other masks, that concern Baldwin in Nobody Knows My Name. You don't know my name because you can't see me, these essays say. You see only the mask you have made me wear." Baldwin tackles the politics of race in "Princes and Powers"; "Fifth Avenue, Uptown"; "East River, Downtown"; 'A Fly in Buttermilk"; "Faulkner and Desegregation"; "In Search of a Majority," and in the title essay. "In the essays on Gide, Bergman, Wright and Mailer, which make up the second half of the book, Baldwin attempts to discover his 'name' by examining the inner worlds of other artists… He calls on America to look at itself, to tear down its myths and to regain an ability to see things as they are." Widely praised on publication, Alfred Kazin hailed it as "the spiritual biography of someone who hopes, by confronting more than one beast on his way, to see whether his fear is entirely necessary" (The Reporter). Baldwin was "commissioned by Harper's and Partisan Review to write essays on the various strategies and programs for bringing an end to racial discrimination." Three of the essays herein are in that series: the title essay "Nobody Knows My Name" (Partisan Review, Winter 1959); "A Fly in Buttermilk" (titled The Hard Kind of Courage, Harper's October 1958); "Faulkner and Desegregation" (Partisan Review, Winter 1956)."These eloquent articles reveal his complex attitude toward the South… [and] are a rehearsal for The Fire Next Time, his most famous essay" (Porter in Bloom, James Baldwin, 55).