Going To Meet the Man 1ST Edition

by James Baldwin

Hardcover, 1965

Status

Available

Call number

FIX

Collection

Publication

DIAL PRESS (1965), Hardcover

Description

Fiction. Short Stories. "There's no way not to suffer. But you try all kinds of ways to keep from drowning in it." The men and women in these eight short fictions grasp this truth on an elemental level, and their stories, as told by James Baldwin, detail the ingenious and often desperate ways in which they try to keep their heads above water. It may be the heroin that a down-and-out jazz pianist uses to face the terror of pouring his life into an inanimate instrument. It may be the brittle piety of a father who can never forgive his son for his illegitimacy. Or it may be the screen of bigotry that a redneck deputy has raised to blunt the awful childhood memory of the day his parents took him to watch a black man being murdered by a gleeful mob.… (more)

Media reviews

All of these tales have an undeniable urgency, power and anger, yet only "The Outing" achieves true artistry, probably because it is the most personal and not melodramatic at all. Symphonic in structure, mixing religious and sexual motifs, encompassing various shades of characters and situations
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against the background of a boat trip up the Hudson, "The Outing" is memorable in every sense; funny, sad, colorful, it is a triumphant performance.
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User reviews

LibraryThing member booklove2
I always had a feeling Baldwin was a genius. I'm a bit sad I have just now started reading him. I thought it was time and pulled this from the shelf. And wow. I think some people have this way of seeing and juggling all of the past, present, and future at the same time and Baldwin is one of these
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people. Perfect on a sentence level, and then he has these sentences that are complete truth on a human level that I really don't think anyone then or now could even write. These stories seem way before their time. The last story is a fierce brutal gut punch of a way to end the book. My favorite of this great bunch is probably 'Previous Condition'. My only problem is sometimes stories would have the same names used in other stories and then I would wonder if they were supposed to be the same characters moving throughout stories. I must read everything he has ever written. Glad I finally picked this up.
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LibraryThing member spoko
Spectacular, from start to finish. The title story and "Sonny's Blues," especially.
LibraryThing member larryerick
Simply an outstanding short story collection. Story after story, I kept saying to myself, "Oh, yes, that's very, very true! I never thought of it that way before!" Even the single story that I thought was bordering on mundane, by my standards, had those very same "Ah, hah!" moments. But as good as
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everything before it was, nothing quite prepares you for the power of the collection's title story, "Going to Meet the Man". If all the stories before it were like a friend gently poking their finger on your chest, to make a point, then "Going to Meet the Man" is an electric cattle prod jammed against your heart and held there. Take all the black civil rights books you've ever read. Distill them into a few brief pages. Add a drop of nitro glycerin for good measure, and then lean back and read. But, while this story specifically covers racial tensions in America, it easily goes further in describing any of all the societal hatreds, whether it be blacks and whites, Catholics and Protestants, Aryans and Jews, Sunnis and Shiites, or any other Us-In-Control versus Them-That-Are-Different dynamic. Powerful, powerful stuff.
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LibraryThing member viviennestrauss
The title story was horrific, sad and absolutely sickening. My favorite was Sonny's Blues.
LibraryThing member DanielSTJ
A solid collection of tales that will serve to entertain and allow you into the literary, and poetic, style of Baldwin's prose. The characterizations, interspersed with the dynamics of the settings, serve to enlighten us about things from a different time and place. Overall, it was quite well
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done.

3.5 stars.
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LibraryThing member IonaS
It was seemingly Baldwin’s life purpose to write these books about blacks and their outrageous treatment by whites.

Baldwin died in 1987. He described the condition and treatment of blacks in the US as he had experienced them. I trust that all this has greatly improved since then, but I can’t
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be certain.

In Baldwin’s prose the n-word is used continually. Surprisingly, the blacks themselves use it about and to each other – “You dirty black n-----”.

This collection of short stories is the best fiction of Baldwin’s that I’ve read.

I didn’t understand The Man Child and the reason for the murder at the end.

I would really need to re-read the stories to properly appreciate them.

Understandably, most of Baldwin’s writing expresses the brutality he saw among the blacks in Harlem where he lived.

In my view, the best story in collection was the last one, Going to meet the man. It was also the most terrible. It shows how a little white boy, Jesse, taken to witness the lynching of a black man, grows up to to be a deputy sheriff who beats and tortures his black prisoners practically to the point of death. “They were animals, they were no better than animals, what could be done with people like that?”

The lynching itself is depicted graphically and horribly.

If you feel like beginning to read some of Baldwin’s fiction, this is a good place to start.
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Awards

Audie Award (Finalist — 2012)

Language

Original publication date

1965
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