The Artist’s Struggle for Integrity

Explores the artist’s responsibility to tell the truth in a society built on illusion and denial. Baldwin sees the artist as someone compelled to confront reality honestly and make visible what society works hardest to ignore.

Delivered as a talk in 1962, it opens with Baldwin’s distrust of words like "artist" and "integrity," then rebuilds both from the ground up: the artist’s struggle is a metaphor for the struggle of everyone trying to become human.

Collected in The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings (2010), edited by Randall Kenan.

James Baldwin (1924–1987) was an American novelist, essayist, and playwright. Go Tell It on the Mountain, Notes of a Native Son, and The Fire Next Time made him the moral witness of the American twentieth century.