The Devil Finds Work - (Vintage International) by James Baldwin (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

From "the best essayist in this country" (The New York Times Book Review) comes an incisive book-length essay about racism in American movies that challenges the underlying assumptions in many of the films that have shaped our consciousness.

Baldwin's personal reflections on movies gathered here in a book-length essay are also an appraisal of American racial politics. Offering a look at racism in American movies and a vision of America's self-delusions and deceptions, Baldwin considers such films as In the Heat of the Night, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, and The Exorcist.

Here are our loves and hates, biases and cruelties, fears and ignorance reflected by the films that have entertained and shaped us. And here too is the stunning prose of a writer whose passion never diminished his struggle for equality, justice, and social change.

Review Quotes

"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.