James Baldwin. Steve Schapiro. The Fire Next Time

(Hardback)

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First published in 1963, James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time stabbed at the heart of America's so-called "Negro problem." As remarkable for its masterful prose as for its frank and personal account of the black experience in the United States, it is considered one of the most passionate and influential explorations of 1960s race relations, weaving thematic threads of love, faith, and family into a candid assault on the hypocrisy of the "land of the free."

Now, James Baldwin's rich, raw, and ever relevant prose is reprinted with more than 100 photographs from Steve Schapiro, who traveled the American South with Baldwin for Life magazine. The encounter thrust Schapiro into the thick of the movement, allowing for vital, often iconic, images both of civil rights leaders-including Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, Fred Shuttlesworth, and Jerome Smith-and such landmark events as the March on Washington and the Selma march.

Rounding out the edition are Schapiro's stories from the field, captions by journalist Marcia Davis, and an essay by Gloria Baldwin Karefa-Smart, who was with her brother James in Sierra Leone when he started to work on the story. The result is a remarkable visual and textual record of one of the most important and enduring struggles of the American experience.

First published as a TASCHEN Collector's Edition, now available in a pocket-sized Centennial Edition.

Reviews

Steve Schapiro's impressive photos are all testimonies to contemporary history. Just like the essay by the writer James Baldwin. * Welt am Sonntag *
Schapiro and Baldwin showed the possibility of what strong writing and photography could achieve in their time. In ours, we'd do well to look to them. * The Guardian *

Author Bio

James Baldwin (19241987) was a novelist, essayist, playwright, poet, and social critic, and one of the most brilliant and provocative literary figures of the postwar era. His nonfiction collections, most notably Notes of a Native Son (1955) and The Fire Next Time (1963), and novels, including Giovannis Room (1956) and Another Country (1962), explore palpable yet unspoken intricacies of racial, sexual, and class distinctions in mid-20th-century America. A Harlem, New York, native, he primarily made his home in the south of France. Steve Schapiros career as a freelance photojournalist started with a story on Arkansas migrant workers that made the cover of the The New York Times Magazine in 1961. Since then, his images have appeared in Life, Look, Time, Newsweek, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, and many other publications. In the 1970s, he began a second career as a successful publicity stills and movie poster photographer, working on classic films such as Taxi Driver, The Way We Were, and The Godfatherwhich can be seen in The Godfather Family Album (TASCHEN, 2008). In 2016, he collaborated with Lawrence Schiller on a Barbra Streisand book (TASCHEN) and in 2017, his Civil Rights photographs were combined with the text of James Baldwin in The Fire Next Time (TASCHEN). He died in 2022.