BALDWIN JAMES Typed Document Signed in full a rough proposal

Sale 2043 - Lot 286

Price Realized: $ 690

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Estimate: $ 500 - $ 750

BALDWIN, JAMES. Typed Document Signed, in full, a rough proposal for a work to be titled Letter to my Younger Brother (apparently never published), detailing a short novel on the difficulties of freedom. Signed at the end of the second page. 2 pages, two 4to sheets; folds. Np, circa 1955-60

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"Author actually has a younger brother, David, now serving with the United States Army in Japan. And the controlling tone of this book . . . will by dictated by the need, which can be taken as personal, to affirm for this brother, which the author helped raise, that standard of human and personal dignity which he must, in his own life, and at whatever cost, maintain. The book, which is not meant to be very long -- is (tentatively) divided into three parts. The first part is meant to be an informal and interpretive glance at history, that is, to convey to David a sense of his own history in this country, an awareness of his ancestors and of distances covered -- a sense, in short, of his own place in this long line from slavery to maddening and ambiguous freedom . . . And the third section is, in effect, a summing up and a looking forward and turns on the idea that progress brings its own dangers and complexities and that while freedom is incontestably the finest way to live, it is also the most dangerous and the most loaded with responsibilities and that the real job of living is to learn how to live as a free man . . ."