Few writers have seen America more clearly than James Baldwin

IN THE monthsFBI after a young black man in Ferguson, Missouri, was shot by a white policeman in 2014—galvanising the Black Lives Matter movement—no prominent African-American writer was invoked more often on social media than James Baldwin. That was no surprise: Baldwin was an eloquent civil-rights activist, whom the watched anxiously and who counted among his friends. Yet as Robert Reid-Pharr, a professor at New York University, jokes: “James Baldwin never wrote a sentence of 140 characters, ever.”