Typescript draft with holograph emendations, Another Country

In Baldwin’s third novel, Another Country (1962), a troubled man’s sudden death frames an exploration of the lives and loves of those connected to him. The realism with which Baldwin sought to portray the book’s characters—Black, white, queer, straight—was inspired in part by the style of one of his literary idols, Henry James (1843–1916). Baldwin explained to The New York Times: “I am aiming at what Henry James called ‘perception at the pitch of passion.’”

This page of the manuscript for Another Country, showing Baldwin’s epigraph, underscores his Jamesian approach. It also tells us where he lived when he was writing it. Today a bronze plaque designates 81 Horatio Street in the West Village as Baldwin’s former home.