The American writer James Baldwin was born 100 years ago today.
He was by any stretch of the imagination one of the most radical and important voices of the 20th century.
His 1956 novel Giovanni's Room was a remarkable achievement.
It was the first mainstream novel written by a black man to include queer themes.
Made even more remarkable by the fact that it would be another seven years before segregation was ended in America, and decades before the birth of gay rights in the country.
He was the outspoken grandson of a slave who Bore witness to the consequences of American racial strife.
He was an opinionated, critical, blunt, and provocative man at a time when THAT was considered dangerous .
But it was as an author that he took the greatest risks that no other commercial writer at the time was taking, that could so easily have destroyed his career.
His first novel, The semi-autobiographical Go Tell It on the Mountain was published in America in 1952, and it was an immediate critical and Commercial Success.
His follow-up novel would come four years later when his American publisher Alfred Knopf received the manuscript for Giovanni's Room.
