
The Disasters We’ve Become
DAVID O’NEILL: In Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own (Crown, $27) you write about your student days at Princeton, when you first encountered Baldwin. Can you talk about the initial resistance you felt to his work?
EDDIE S. GLAUDE JR.: There was initial resistance on two levels, but they’re connected. One was that Baldwin just asked too much of me. I had to deal with my own pain as a precondition to saying anything about the world. He believes firmly in the Socratic dictum that the unexamined life is not worth living, and he grounds his social criticism in