Sprecher
Beschreibung
Over the course of his forty-year career, James Baldwin recruited the very best professionals—agents, lawyers, and accountants--to manage his literary business. This is a little-known fact because scholars and critics of Baldwin’s canon have not systematically surveyed and analyzed those relationships.
Drawing from Baldwin’s business records sourced in multiple US archives (the NYPL/Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture; the Beinecke Library at Yale; the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas-Austin; and the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center at Boston University), I will offer a first look at Baldwin’s business team (Helen Strauss, Robert Park Mills, Robert Lantz, and Tria French), to examine how their collaborations with Baldwin allowed him to navigate the changing terrain and terms of the post-WWII U.S. publishing industry. In dialogue with scholarship on Agent Studies and US Book History (e.g., Laura McGrath's Middlemen; Laurence Cossu-Beaumont’s Deux Agents Littéraires dans le Siècle Américain; Daniel Sinykin’s Big Fiction, Richard Jean So’s Redlining Culture, and Howard and Kenton Rambsy’s forthcoming One at a Time), my presentation will identify and examine the structural dynamics that characterized Baldwin’s deals and dealings with his agents, on the one hand; and I will consider how those business decisions and practices shaped key aspects of Baldwin’s literary craft, on the other.
Speaker Bio:
Jacqueline Goldsby is Thomas E. Donnelly Professor of English and Black Studies at Yale University. She specializes in African American literary criticism and Print Culture Studies during the long century of Jim Crow segregation, from 1865 to 1965. She is the author of the prizewinning A Spectacular Secret: Lynching in American Life and Literature (2006), and the widely-acclaimed Norton Critical Edition of James Weldon Johnson’s 1912 novel, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (2015). She’s currently at work on two book projects, The Business of Becoming “Jimmy”: James Baldwin and the Work of Art, and Writing from the Lower Frequencies: African American Literature and Its Mid-Century Moment. She has also founded two Digital Humanities projects, “Mapping the Stacks: A Guide to Black Chicago’s Hidden Archives” (2005-2010) and presently, since 2017, The Black Bibliography Project (co-directed with Meredith McGill at Rutgers University).