James Baldwin in France

The fellowship stipend financed his first trip to France, but he gave much of it to his mother[7] because his stepfather had died several years earlier, leaving her with eight younger children.

[1] There, he joined a significant community of intellectuals and artists, including a number of Black Americans (for example, Josephine Baker and Richard Wright[1]) who were mainly involved in the arts and entertainment.

The essay included a scathing critique of Wright's major 1940 novel, Native Son, which led to a permanent estrangement between the two men.

[14] Performers at the jazz festivals in nearby Nice and Juan-les-Pins would stay with him (including Josephine Baker, Ray Charles, Miles Davis and Nina Simone).

[14] Baldwin also befriended French intellectuals and artists who had homes in Saint Paul, among them Yves Montand, Simone Signoret and Marguerite Yourcenar.

[18] Notable works he wrote in Saint Paul, in full or in part, include Just Above My Head (1979), If Beale Street Could Talk (1974), Harlem Quartet (1987) and "Open Letter to My Sister, Angela Y. Davis" (1970).

In the winter of 1951, he stayed for three months in a chalet owned by a friend in the tiny, isolated village of Loèche-les-Bains in the Swiss Alps in order to finish Go Tell it on the Mountain.

[16] He reported that he listened to Bessie Smith records while finishing the novel, explaining that her music helped him "to dig back to ... remember the things I had heard and seen and felt.

For Baldwin, Istanbul was isolated in the sense that it removed him his usual professional and social contacts — he knew few people there and did not speak the Turkish language — so it afforded him a quiet space where he was able to complete his novel in two months.

"[20] Istanbul seems to have served mainly as a refuge that provided a congenial context in which he could write; it does not directly feature in any of his fiction, though it could have indirectly influenced some of it.

During his 23-year stay in France, Baldwin frequently returned to the United States in order to conduct business, renew ties with the mother country and support in the Civil Rights movement.

"[21]In addition to Switzerland, Turkey and the United States, Baldwin's travels included trips to England, Puerto Rico, Israel, Senegal and the Soviet Union.

"[22] His expatriation placed him in a long line of American writers whose stays in Europe had a profound influence on their work (e.g., Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein).

[23] In the words of the National Museum of African-American History and Culture, "Baldwin's time abroad nurtured his literary focus on the complexities of the human experience".

[2] His travels, and especially his decades-long stay in France, provided a vantage point from which to observe his own country, the main subject of his oeuvre.

[14][25] As one critic puts it, his stay in Paris "enabled Baldwin to shed what he felt to be his oppressive and imposed 'Negro' identity and embrace a much more emancipated and individuated sense of himself as an American.

All these themes in Baldwin's Parisian work expressed his creative response to expatriate experiences, but they also lead to some of the most influential theories in our own era's intellectual culture.