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50 free James Baldwin trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
James Baldwin was a teenage preacher in Harlem, a dishwasher in Greenwich Village, an expatriate in Paris with forty dollars to his name, and by 1963 the face on the cover of Time magazine explaining America to itself. He wrote novels that put gay and bisexual men at the centre of serious fiction and essays still quoted in every argument about race. These 50 questions follow the life and the books. The stepfather and the church, Countee Cullen as a junior-high teacher, Richard Avedon on the school magazine, Beauford Delaney and Richard Wright, the Rosenwald grant that paid for the flight to Paris, the stolen bedsheets that got him jailed, and the Swiss village that became Stranger in the Village. Then the work: Go Tell It on the Mountain, Notes of a Native Son, Giovanni's Room and its guillotined bartender, Another Country finished in Istanbul, The Fire Next Time and its letter to a nephew, Blues for Mister Charlie, Sonny's Blues, If Beale Street Could Talk and the films that followed, I Am Not Your Negro and Regina King's Oscar. Every answer is cited to a page we checked, with a short explanation so you learn something even when you miss.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which New York neighbourhood was James Baldwin born in 1924?
Harlem
He was born at Harlem Hospital to Emma Berdis Jones, who had come north from Maryland in the Great Migration.
Q 02What was Baldwin's surname at birth?
Jones
He took the name of his stepfather David Baldwin, a Baptist preacher his mother married in 1927.
Q 03What was the occupation of Baldwin's stepfather, David Baldwin?
Baptist preacher
Their difficult relationship fed Go Tell It on the Mountain and the essay Notes of a Native Son.
Q 04Which Renaissance-era poet taught Baldwin French at Frederick Douglass Junior High?
Countee Cullen
Baldwin said his dream of living in France was sparked by Cullen's early impression on him.
Q 05Which future photographer worked with Baldwin on the De Witt Clinton school magazine?
Richard Avedon
The Magpie staff also included the future publishers Emile Capouya and Sol Stein.
Q 06At what age did 'Brother Baldwin' first preach at Fireside Pentecostal Assembly?
14
He delivered his last sermon in 1941 and later wrote that the church was a mask for self-hatred and despair.
Q 07Which modernist painter became Baldwin's mentor and showed him a Black man could live by art?
Beauford Delaney
Delaney later made Baldwin's house in Saint-Paul-de-Vence his second home, painting in the garden.
Q 08At which Greenwich Village restaurant did Baldwin work under Connie Williams?
The Calypso
The unsegregated eatery drew prominent Black diners and the friend Stan Weir, to whom Baldwin came out.
Q 09Which actor did Baldwin befriend in 1944 at a theatre class at The New School?
Marlon Brando
The friendship lasted through the Civil Rights Movement; both appeared at the 1963 March on Washington.
Q 10Which novelist, whose Native Son appeared in 1940, did Baldwin meet in 1945 and later criticise?
Richard Wright
The essays Everybody's Protest Novel and Many Thousands Gone strained but did not end the friendship.
Q 11Baldwin's first published essay, on anti-Semitism among Black Americans, ran in which magazine?
Commentary
It explored anti-Semitism among Black Americans and concluded Harlem was a parody of white America.
Q 12How much money did Baldwin have when he flew to Paris on 11 November 1948?
Forty dollars
He gave most of his Rosenwald Fellowship to his mother and left at the age of 24.
Q 13Baldwin's 1948 Rosenwald Fellowship grant was worth how much?
$1,500
It was meant for a book of photographs and essays on Harlem churches that was never finished.
Q 21Which essay in Notes of a Native Son attacks Uncle Tom's Cabin and Native Son?
Everybody's Protest Novel
Baldwin argued protest literature denies life by reducing people to categories.
Q 22Giovanni's Room is set in which city?
Paris
Its narrator David, an American, begins an affair with an Italian bartender while his girlfriend is in Spain.
Q 23What fate awaits Giovanni at the end of Giovanni's Room?
He is guillotined
The whole novel is narrated on the night before his execution for murder.
Q 14In December 1949 Baldwin was jailed in Paris for receiving what stolen goods?
Bedsheets
A friend had taken them from another hotel; the dismissal drew laughter and the essay Equal in Paris.
Q 15Baldwin's partner Lucien Happersberger, whom he met in Paris, was of which nationality?
Swiss
He was 17 when they met; trips to his family's chateau in Loèches-les-Bains produced Stranger in the Village.
Q 16Baldwin's essay 'Stranger in the Village' grew out of stays in which country?
Switzerland
The villagers had never seen a Black man; the essay ended up in Notes of a Native Son.
Q 17What was Baldwin's first novel, published in 1953?
Go Tell It on the Mountain
Time magazine later listed it among the 100 best English-language novels since 1923.
Q 18What was the working title of the first novel when Baldwin showed it to the author of Native Son?
Crying Holy
Wright got him a $500 Harper advance, but Harper eventually declined and Knopf published it.
Q 19Who is the teenage protagonist of Baldwin's 1953 debut novel?
John Grimes
His violent, fanatically religious stepfather Gabriel is drawn from David Baldwin.
Q 20How many essays make up Notes of a Native Son (1955)?
Ten
They had appeared between 1948 and 1955 in Commentary, The New Leader, Partisan Review, The Reporter and Harper's.
Q 24Giovanni's Room surprised readers of 1956 because its characters were predominantly what?
White
The public expected African-American subjects; the homoerotic content caused the real controversy.
Q 25Baldwin's 1954 play The Amen Corner centres on which preacher?
Sister Margaret
She is a fictionalised Mother Horn from Fireside Pentecostal; Beah Richards earned a Tony nomination in the role.
Q 26'Sonny's Blues', Baldwin's 1957 story of two brothers, first appeared in which journal?
Partisan Review
Sonny is a jazz musician arrested for heroin; the story was collected in Going to Meet the Man in 1965.
Q 27Baldwin completed Another Country in 1961 during a stay in which city?
Istanbul
He had gone to Israel meaning to continue to Africa and went to Turkey instead, the first of many stays.
Q 28Which character's downfall opens Another Country?
Rufus Scott, a jazz drummer
The novel's taboo themes included bisexuality, interracial couples and extramarital affairs.
Q 29The Fire Next Time (1963) consists of how many essays?
Two
My Dungeon Shook is a letter to his nephew; Down at the Cross covers the church and the Nation of Islam.
Q 30The first essay of The Fire Next Time is addressed to Baldwin's nephew on what anniversary?
The centenary of Emancipation
The nephew was 14; the essay first ran in The Progressive in late 1962.