Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone

In this magnificently passionate, angry, and tender novel, James Baldwin produced an indelible portrait of the artist as a young black man, or, rather, as a man struggling to juggle several identities -- racial, sexual, and political -- on the mercilessly floodlit stage of American public life.

Struck down by a massive heart attack at the height of his career, actor Leo Proud-hammer hovers between life and death as he tries to make sense of the choices that have taken him this far. Baldwin follows him from his childhood on the streets of Harlem to his arrival in the intoxicating world of the theater; through wrenching love affairs with a white woman and a younger black man; and, above all, through the treacherous labyrinth of race, in which even (and especially) the most successful black man remains a perpetual outsider. Overpowering in its vitality, extravagant in the intensity of its feeling, Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone is a major work by one of our most important writers.