Early Novels and Stories presents the novels and short stories that established Baldwin's reputation as a writer who fused unblinking realism with rare verbal eloquence. His first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), tells the story, rooted in Baldwin's own experience, of a preacher's son coming of age in 1930's Harlem. Giovanni's Room (1956) is a searching, and in its day controversial, treatment of the tragic self-delusions of a young American expatriate at war with his own homosexuality. Another Country (1962), a wide-ranging exploration of America's racial and sexual boundaries, depicts the suicide of a gifted drummer and its ripple effect on those who knew him. Going to Meet the Man (1965) collects Baldwin's short fiction, including the masterful "Sonny's Blues," his unforgettable portrait of a jazz pianist struggling with drug addiction.

Collected Essays--the most comprehensive gathering of Baldwin's nonfiction ever published--confirms him as a uniquely prophetic voice in American letters. With burning passion and jabbing, epigrammatic wit, he fearlessly articulated issues of race and democracy and American identity in such famous essays as "The Harlem Ghetto," "Everybody's Protest Novel," "Many Thousands Gone," and "Stranger in the Village." Here are the complete texts of his early landmark collections, Notes of a Native Son (1955) and Nobody Knows My Name (1961), which established him as an essential intellectual voice of his time, combining in characteristic fashion the personal, the literary, and the political; the classic The Fire Next Time (1963), his most penetrating analysis of America's racial divide and an impassioned call to "end the racial nightmare...and change the history of the world"; and the later volumes No Name in the Street (1972) and The Devil Finds Work (1976), which chart his continuing response to the social and political turbulence of his era. Another 36 essays--nine of them previously uncollected--include some of Baldwin's earliest published writings, as well as revealing later insights into the language of Shakespeare, the poetry of Langston Hughes, and the music of Earl Hines.