The Devil Finds Work - Softcover

James A. Baldwin

4.26

2,156 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0385334605 ISBN 13: 9780385334600

Publisher: Delta, 2000

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James Baldwin At The Movies... Provocative, timeless, brilliant.

Bette Davis's eyes, Joan Crawford's bitchy elegance, Stepin Fetchit's stereotype, Sidney Poitier's superhuman black man... These are the movie stars and the qualities that influenced James Baldwin... and now become part of his incisive look at racism in American movies.

Baldwin challenges the underlying assumptions in such films as In the Heat of the Night, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, and The Exorcist, offering us a vision of America's self-delusions and deceptions. Here are our loves and hates, biases and cruelties, fears and ignorance reflected by the films that have entertained us and shaped our consciousness. And here, too, is the stunning prose of a writer whose passion never diminished his struggle for equality, justice, and social change.

From The Birth of a Nation to The Exorcist--one of America's most important writers turns his critical eye to American film.

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Review:

"If Van Gogh was our 19th-century artist-saint, James Baldwin is our 20th-century one." --Michael Ondaatje

"The best essayist in this country--a man whose power has always been in his reasoned, biting sarcasm; his insistence on removing layer by layer the hardened skin with which Americans shield themselves from their country." --The New York Times Book Review

"It will be hard for the reader to see these films in quite the same way again." --The Christian Science Monitor

"He has taken the old subject of race and made it even more personal probing perhaps more deeply than ever before into American racial practices." --The Nation

"A provocative discussion." --Saturday Review

About the Author:

James Baldwin (1924-1987) was a novelist, essayist, playwright, poet, and social critic. His first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, appeared in 1953 to excellent reviews, and his essay collections Notes of a Native Son and The Fire Next Time were bestsellers that made him an influential figure in the growing civil rights movement. Baldwin spent much of his life in France, where he moved to escape the racism and homophobia of the United States. He died in France in 1987, a year after being made a Commander of the French Legion of Honor.

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