Abstract
James Baldwin’s major non-fictional works, including the ten essays comprising Notes of a Native Son (1955), show an increasing and painful awareness of the problems inherent in the quest for personal and artistic identity. The crises in Baldwin’s life, most often communicated in his works as artistic, religious, and sexual, have given rise to a single-minded dedication to the search for discovery of the self, even to the present day with his recent return to America. Perceiving that one’s identity must be created in one’s experience, Baldwin continually demonstrates his knowledge of the triple burden of Black, artist, and bisexual in an American cultural environment inimical to each, and thereby informs his writing with an irony that intensifies his search. Each of his major works at bottom attests to the quest for identity which most Baldwin critics either have ignored, in the attempt to place him in the stream of Black protest literature, on the one hand, or minimized, on the other hand, because of their antagonism toward the duality which they find associated with the identity search.