Brief Introduction to the Author of American Literature james baldwin Go to the Mountain and Speak

Brief Introduction to the Author of American Literature james baldwin Go to the Mountain and Speak | Summary | Appreciation of Works

Author Brief Introduction james baldwin is an African-American novelist, essayist, dramatist and social critic. 1924 was born in Harlem, a black community in new york, and 1987 died of stomach cancer in France on February 0. He is an illegitimate child. His grandmother used to be a slave in the southern plantation. His stepfather is a poor priest who is not supported by the parish. He was very cruel to Baldwin. Baldwin claimed that his childhood was extremely poor. A family 1 1 lives in a small and shabby apartment. He has little education, and mainly relies on self-study. When he was a child, he often held his brother or sister in one hand and read books in the other. However, his stepfather opposed his creation and wanted him to become a priest. /kloc-began to preach in the church at the age of 0/4. Three years later, he not only gave up preaching, but also no longer believed in religion. He left home soon after leaving the church, struggling in what he called "American business world", working as a waiter, a page, an industrial worker and a restaurant to wash dishes. The racial discrimination in American society finally made him unbearable, forcing him to go to Paris in 1948, and finished his best novel "Go to the Mountain" under the condition of hard work and hunger. It was not until 1957 that the "Little Rock Incident" of racial bloodshed occurred in the United States that he returned to China. When he lived in Europe, he published many articles on black issues in American newspapers, especially criticized the tradition of cultivating his famous black writer richard wright, which made him stand out in American literature. 1962 The novel Another Country became a best seller, and he also became the most concerned African-American writer after Wright. Baldwin is a versatile writer. He has created many genres of works. His best and most famous is prose, which can be regarded as one of the most outstanding essayists in the United States after World War II.

This novel was written by a black priest who lived in Harlem, a black area in new york in 1930s. The hero of the novel is a clever and studious black boy John. The story revolves around him and his stepfather, mother, aunt and others. John's stepfather Gabriel, a church deacon, was "tempted by the devil". His mother used to be a slave in a plantation in the south and gave birth to many children. By the time she was 30 years old, her husband had died and all four children had been lost-one died of illness, two were sent to the slave market by the owner, and the other was brought home by a special person. Later, the master assigned her a slave husband and gave birth to a daughter Florence and a son Gabriel. Shortly after Gabriel was born, his biological father fled to the north and his whereabouts were unknown. After the civil war, their family was free. Gabriel has been naughty since he was a child because his mother dotes on him. He often plays truant, fights and provokes white people. When he grew up, he became a "devil in the world", eating, drinking, whoring and gambling, and was imprisoned more than once. One day, Gabriel spent the night with a bad woman and strolled home in the morning. Encouraged by the fresh air, the quiet scenery and the big trees standing in front of him, he suddenly thought of the greatness of God and his own smallness, and began to repent and start over. After that, he became a devout believer, and soon won the respect of people around him and became a missionary. He also married Deborah, an ugly black girl who was looked down upon by white people many years ago, but there was no love between them. Gabriel treated her badly, and soon after marriage, he had sex with another black girl Esther who worked with him. Esther is pregnant soon. Gabriel was afraid that he would be ashamed to be a man when his scandal became public, so he stole his wife Deborah's private money and sent Esther to Chicago to have a baby. As a result, Esther died in childbirth, and their illegitimate child Royal was raised by Esther's parents. Later, she died in a hotel in Chicago and a knife stabbed him in the throat. Because of selfishness and cowardice, Gabriel has been afraid to admit that Royal is his child. A few years later, Deborah fell ill and died. Before she died, she told Gabriel that she had long known about him and Esther, and that Royal was his illegitimate child. She only hated him for being unfaithful to her and never confided in her, otherwise she would be willing to take Royal home to raise her. After Deborah's death, Gabriel left the south and went to Harlem, new york, where he found his sister Florence, who had been away for 20 years, and settled down. Florence left the south at the age of 26, and she had had enough of the long-term racial discrimination in the south. One day, the white master who was a maid came to flirt with her and asked her to be his concubine. She finally made up her mind to bid farewell to her mother who was ill in bed and resolutely came to the north to make a living. She met Frank, a black worker in Harlem, new york. They got married by falling in love, but Frank didn't make much money, and the husband and wife often fell out because of economic problems. After every quarrel, he goes out for a drink. One night after more than ten years of marriage, he came back from home for two days and three nights. They had a heated argument in the small kitchen. Frank ran away from home in a rage and never came home again. Later, when the world war broke out, he was drafted into the army and died in France. Florence loves her husband very much. After he left, she felt relaxed at first, and then regretted it. She had to work as a woman worker to make a living and live alone. Florence met a wicked woman named Elizabeth in new york. Her childhood was spent in a series of disasters. When my mother died at the age of 8, my mother's sister came to her house, thinking that her father was not worthy to raise an innocent little girl, and forced her to separate from her beloved father. Later, she fell in love with Richard, a black shop assistant, and they went to new york together. Because there is no money to get married, we have to live together first. One night, Richard was arrested by the police and said he was suspected of robbery and murder. Later, although he was released for lack of evidence, he was insulted and beaten by white police during his detention. When he got home, he held Elizabeth in his arms and cried for a while. At night, he cut off the blood vessels on his wrist with a razor. Elizabeth made a fatal mistake. In order not to increase Richard's mental burden, she didn't tell him that she was pregnant, otherwise Richard might not commit suicide. She loves Richard so much that she doesn't deny that as long as there is Richard, the happiness in heaven is equal to zero for her. She also does not deny that if she is forced to choose between Richard and God, she can only-even cry-stay away from God. When Richard died, she despaired of life and lived only for Richard's posthumous son. After Gabriel came to Harlem, he met Elizabeth at his sister Florence's home. First, he persuaded her to repent and convert to God, and then he proposed to her, promising to treat her illegitimate child John as his own. Elizabeth finally married her son John for the sake of her son, and gave birth to a boy and two girls with him. The whole book was written in flashback. At the beginning of the novel, John is 14 years old, and Roy, the oldest child born to Elizabeth and Gabriel, is only a teenager. The relationship between the two brothers and their father is very abnormal. When gabriel proposed, he promised to raise John as his own son, which he did, but he and John had no feelings and often beat John for details, which aroused John's disgust. John always thought Gabriel was his biological father. On the one hand, he wants to love him, on the other hand, he can't help hating him. He not only wants to pursue material enjoyment and the happiness of secular life, but also hopes that he will not become a sinner of God and his soul will be saved after death. On the other hand, Roy has a stubborn temper by nature. Once he had a fight with a white child and got a knife on the head, which almost killed him. When Gabriel quarreled with Elizabeth for him and hit her, Roy even scolded his father: "Stop it, you black bastard, or I'll kill you!" " "Although gabriel beat him up for this, he loved him deeply and felt that his behavior was very similar to his childhood. The book ends with John confessing in church, but on the way home, Florence exposes Gabriel's hypocrisy and says, "Of all the men I know, you are the one who wants the Bible to be full of lies-because once that song is blown, you have to repent forever. "

Appreciation of works Baldwin lost his father's love when he was a child. His stepfather didn't understand him and was too hard on him. Later, he devoted his psychology and emotions-his love and hate, his fear and loneliness-to poetry, drama and novels. This book is regarded as Baldwin's semi-autobiographical novel. Most of the contents in the book are related to his personal experience of preaching in the church for several years. The profound psychological description of various characters in the book is the expression of his true thoughts and feelings. Baldwin criticized Mrs. Stowe's novel Uncle Tom's Cabin and Native Son, the masterpiece of richard wright, the most famous black writer at that time (also his mentor), long before writing the novel, saying that Bigger, the hero of Native Son, is actually a descendant of Uncle Tom, but Bigger's personality is just the opposite of Uncle Tom's, and his heart is full of fear and hatred: fear urges him to kill people, and hatred urges him to * *. Baldwin stressed that both Mrs. Stowe and Wright wrote "protest novels", but these novels are out of date. Bigger's tragedy is not that he is African-American or hungry, but that he "fights for his humanity". But in Baldwin's view, "our humanity is our load and our life;" We don't need to fight for it. What we need to do is something many times more difficult than fighting-that is, accepting. " He also said, "If my novels have any meaning, then they only contain this meaning: we should treat all people as' people'. No label, slogan, political party, skin color or even religion is as important as being a human being. So in the final analysis, writing talent is the most important thing. "The most basic point of Baldwin's creative thought is similar to Ellison, the author of Invisible Man, that is, black people are human beings first, so it is more important to discuss and describe the problem of' people' than to write about social and racial discrimination. Baldwin also believes that "American literary tradition is the tradition of the great Henry James". As a new generation of progressive black writers, their interest in Freudian psychoanalysis and existentialism exceeds that of Marxist theory of class struggle. Therefore, in Baldwin's novels, the relationship between man and race is often revealed through sexual relations. For example, although this book does not often have obscene sexual descriptions like the novels written by the author later, the plot in the book has three unhappy marriages and two loves. Another feature of this book is that all the characters are black, and the plot does not involve racial relations. So the advertisement attached to the original book said, "This book is the first work of a black writer. Although it is written about black people, it is not described from the perspective of race. It can be said that it is a milestone in the development of American literature to a new stage. "This book and Invisible Man, published a year earlier, can indeed be said to be a milestone in the development of African-American literature to a new stage. They shifted the focus of reflection and description of literary works from society to individuals-personal love and hate, personal self-exploration, personal alienation and so on. Their main artistic feature is to describe their psychological activities in detail with various modernist techniques (including stream of consciousness and montage). John, the protagonist of this book, occupies only one third of the book's length, and his time is extremely concentrated (two days and one night before and after John 14' s birthday). However, the author takes John's ideological and psychological changes as the main line, and inserts John's memories of his father, mother and menstruation by changing the lens and jumping time, so that the lives, thoughts and feelings of each character set off each other and form an organic connection. Therefore, this book not only describes the ideological changes of a black teenager who converted to religion. It not only reflects the life experience of the John family, but also reflects the common experience of the majority of black Americans, including the author himself. This book is also unique in describing black family life from a religious perspective. The initial special significance of religion to black Americans. As early as the slave age, slave owners tried their best to induce slaves to believe in religion, so that they could endure the miserable life of this world quietly and only pin their hopes on the kingdom of heaven after death. Therefore, African-American religion not only has its own characteristics, but also is more deceptive. It also has a complicated relationship with African-American life. Baldwin is a famous essayist, and his best work is prose. He thinks that the combination of prose and novel can better express the strong feelings of African Americans. This book vividly expresses the characteristics of prose novels. The last part of the novel describes John lying on the floor in front of the altar and confessing. This is an excellent essay.