If ever there was a time to celebrate Baldwin, it is now. "Only an artist can tell what it is like for anyone who gets to this planet to survive it," he said. This course will explore Baldwin's early life in Harlem, New York City, in the 1920s to 1940s, his emergence as a writer and citizen of his mind, his relationship with America and his emigration to France. Through the study of his Collected Essays & Collected Fiction; Peck's film I Am Not Your Negro; Baldwin's conversations with a range of thinkers from Malcolm X to William F. Buckley; and the complexity of personal questions he raises in himself and in us, we will honor Baldwin's legacy as a civil rights intellectual and activist concerning the intricacies of racial, sexual and class distinctions in Western societies. Student writing will embrace Baldwin's spirit in the creative-intellectual process: "When you're writing, you're trying to find out something which you don't know."