James Baldwin was born in New York City on August 2, 1924. He was born into a life of poverty and never met his father. He was the oldest of nine children. When he was three years old, his mother married a factory worker who was a cruel man. During his childhood years, Baldwin was a vigorous reader. He wrote his first story at the age of twelve and it was published in the local churches newspaper. When he turned seventeen, he left his home and began a literary apprenticeship. In 1943, Baldwin began writing full-time. Even though his works were rejected by many publishers, his book reviews and essays in "The New Leader, The Nation, Commentary and Partisan Reviews" won him a Rosenwald Fellowship in 1948. Many complications and stresses in his life such as his step-father, racism, and the suicide of his friend caused Baldwin to leave the US and go to Paris and London. While there, he wrote his first novel Go Tell It on the Mountain which was based on his preaching experiences as a teenager. He stated after writing this book "Mountain is the book I had to write if I was ever going to write anything else,". Not too long after writing this novel he put together a famous collection of essays called Notes of a Native Son. And then even a second collection of essays Nobody Knows My Name which was written bettween the two famous novels Giovanni's Room and Another Country. His primary home was now in southern France, but around 1857 he began spending half of each year in New York City to lecture and teach people. He wrote Giovanni's Room(1956) which was about a white American who had to come to terms with his homosexuality and Another Country (1962) about racial and gay sexual tensions among intellectuals. His writings including gay themes cause him to receive great criticism from the black community. The Black Panthers and Eldridge Cleaver stated that Baldwin's writings displayed "agonizing, total hatred to blacks." Baldwin went on to create many more novels and essays in his life and won many different awards. Baldwin died of stomach cancer in his home in Saint-Paul-de-Vence in France on December 1, 1987.