Picture the scene in Harlem, New York, on Aug. 1, 1924: Some 3,500 men and women march past the 135th Street Branch Library on Lenox Avenue and the headquarters of the Universal Negro Improvement Association. There, atop a reviewing stand, in full regalia and surrounded by a cadre of saber-wielding guards, the association’s president-general, Marcus Garvey, surveys the spectacle.
Across the street, in Harlem Hospital’s cramped maternity ward, 21-year-old Emma Berdis Jones, recently arrived from Maryland’s eastern shore, labors with the birth of her first child, a son. The next day, Aug. 2, James Arthur Jones wriggles in his bassinet as the pomp of the UNIA’s annual convention continues to fill the air.
Now, in late 2025, a parking lot has replaced the UNIA’s headquarters. Harlem Hospital occupies a newer, larger building on the same ground. The library building is a part of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, where Ed Pavlić is in residency working on his book about the baby boy in the hospital, who, months before he turned 3 years old, gained from his stepfather the name he made famous: James Baldwin.
Now, standing 101 years later where Garvey stood in 1924, Pavlić tells the story.
Pavlić is Distinguished Research Professor of English, African American Studies and Creative Writing at the University of Georgia, where he has taught since 2006. He has published 13 books, including volumes of poetry; critical studies of literature, music, film, and culture; and a novel. His poems, essays, reviews, and other short works have appeared in dozens of outlets, among them The New York Times, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Boston Review.
In recent years, Pavlić has emerged as a primary scholar of Baldwin, the author and civil rights icon who was one of America’s towering literary and public figures of the 20th century. Pavlić’s essays over the past decade have illuminated previously unknown or misunderstood aspects of the writer’s life and work, cementing his status as an essential Baldwin scholar.
On this sunny autumn afternoon in Harlem, Pavlić is nearing the culmination of work that has consumed most of his academic life. Drawing upon his years of study of Baldwin’s public writing and speaking, archival materials in collections around the world, a near-exhaustive personal trove of original publications, and—crucially—decades of correspondence between Baldwin and his brother David, Pavlić is about to publish Darker than Blue: A Radical Life of James Baldwin, a comprehensive literary biography that will offer a new and deeply enriched understanding of the great writer. As Pavlić works while on a research fellowship at the Schomburg Center, the book is under contract with Henry Holt & Company.
Pavlić’s access to the fraternal letters is due to unprecedented cooperation from Baldwin’s family. About 15 years ago, Pavlić learned from Gloria Karefa-Smart, Baldwin’s sister and literary executor, of the long correspondence between the Baldwin brothers. Scores of these letters had been preserved, she said, though almost no one had ever seen them. Even she hadn’t read them. Pavlić asked if he could. Karefa-Smart eventually came around.
“[She saw] that we could use them to tell the story of Baldwin’s life and career in a new way—a deeper and more powerful way than had been done before,” Pavlić says.
And so it was that, in July 2010, Ed Pavlić found himself leaving Karefa-Smart’s Washington, D.C., townhouse with two shopping bags containing the secret record of a deeply thoughtful and intimate conversation between James and David Baldwin spanning four decades—from the early 1950s until shortly before James Baldwin’s death in 1987 at the age of 63.
“Maybe it takes a poet to tell this story,” Karefa-Smart told Pavlić—an aside he, a poet, took to heart.
Evolution of a biography
Pavlić and Karefa-Smart’s original idea was simple: Write a book telling the version of Baldwin’s story contained in those letters. “Simple!” Pavlić laughs.
“I wrote that book,” Pavlić says. “It’s sitting in my drawer, 160,000 words.” But even as he completed that draft, he knew it wasn’t enough. The window the letters opened into Baldwin’s life and mind needed to be presented in a richer historical context. Plus, here and there, things didn’t add up.
As Pavlić’s research progressed, leading him down long, winding paths he’d only glimpsed before, he found that Baldwin’s situation within the literary, social, and political environment of his time had created tensions in his writing. It demanded to be studied in much greater detail—and formed the basis for a significant reassessment of the writer’s work.
Pavlić begins to illustrate the evolving focus of his inquiry by holding up three dense, green hardbound books: the Library of America’s collected James Baldwin. “The scholars who work with Baldwin,” he says, “work from these books. They’re incredible books—every single American family should have all three, and we should all be reading them out loud to each other every night.”
But Pavlić had begun to note “irreconcilable discrepancies in the record.” There were themes between the essays and the novels, he said, that were in direct conflict with each other—they had been written and published for different reasons, for different audiences, and during different historical eras. The presentation of Baldwin’s essays in collected editions like the Library of America volumes makes it easy to regard them, alongside the novels, as part of a continuous and unified body of work. But Baldwin’s writing—and the history he engaged—is far more complex and volatile.
Baldwin wrote his novels slowly, steadily, stubbornly. They took years; he published only six in his lifetime. His essays, meanwhile, were published frequently during those years, in a diverse range of periodicals—from commercial magazines like Harper’s, Esquire and The New Yorker to Cold War-era newspapers and intellectual journals such as The New Leader,Commentary, and Partisan Review.
Pavlić began collecting these old print publications and studying the essays in their original context. “I began to understand and then research where those essays really came from,” he says. “Where they were first published, who paid for them, who edited them, who else wrote for them, and who read those magazines during the times those essays came out.”
The conflict Pavlić identified involves Baldwin’s ideas about how people are constituted and defined: as self-determined individuals enacting their own choices and priorities, or as mutually dependent members of a society, shaped and re-shaped by relationships, interactions, circumstances, and histories. Pavlić began to think of this as a conflict “between individuality and mutuality.”
“In Baldwin’s early essays,” Pavlić says, “the individual is the basic building block of human life—and in Western life, that individual is free. That freedom is something that just doesn’t exist in Baldwin’s novels, nor that existed in his life as a gay Black man in mid-20th-century America … although it is a very important political idea. I couldn’t figure out how that very important political idea could be so central to his work as an essayist and not just absent from but in direct conflict with his work as a novelist.”
Those novels, Pavlić says, demonstrate repeatedly, at first to devastating effect, and later with liberating force, the interconnectedness of people and our crucial importance for one another.
Pavlić’s research led him to existing scholarship on the Cultural Cold War, such as that by the British historian Frances Stonor Saunders, which had uncovered the web of mid-20th century efforts by U.S. government agencies to promote Western, anti-communist ideology through manipulation of artists and their work. These propaganda campaigns included the financing of and influence over international arts initiatives, grantmaking entities, publishers, and journals—a significant number of which Baldwin (like many other American artists of his time) depended upon for his livelihood as a professional writer. An emphasis on the power of free individuals to shape history, as opposed to the idea that we rise and fall together as a society (which evoked notions of the communist “collective”), was a key condition of this much-needed support, and Baldwin made concessions accordingly.
Baldwin’s entanglement with the forces of the Cultural Cold War has been scarcely noted, let alone explored in depth, Pavlić says. Its complex impact on his published work became central to Pavlić’s project. As he wrote in a proposal sent to publishers, “[at] its core, Darker than Blue traces a contest between the primacy of individuality in the American myth and Baldwin’s insistence that the most vitally important parts of life are mutual.”
Time in the archives
Pavlić has been intensely focused on research and writing for Darker than Blue. He received a fellowship in fall 2024 from the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts, which provides needed course release to UGA faculty as part of its mission. In July 2025, another fellowship took him to the University of Texas at Austin’s Harry Ransom Center, where he reviewed the center’s archived files of Robert Mills, Baldwin’s agent from 1960 to 1964.
Later that fall at the Schomburg Center, Pavlić expanded the record of Baldwin’s childhood and young adult years in Harlem and Greenwich Village. The center’s archives include remnants of four early drafts of Baldwin’s autobiographical 1953 debut novel Go Tell It on the Mountain. Pavlić was thrilled to find pieces of one draft, titled “Congo Square,” that offer a more detailed and realistic account of its protagonist’s youth than the published version. Even in a novel, no press would have published such a record of the radical, leftist lessons Baldwin internalized during his childhood in the 1930s, nor the sexual awakenings of his adolescence. “Congo Square,” along with independent context from other historical accounts of that era, helped Pavlić form his foundation.
“I was able to use that account to build the story of his childhood and early life in a very different way than has been done before,” he says.
With this stretch of fellowships now complete, Pavlić estimates that the work remaining to finish the book is “90% writing and 10% research.” He’s also editing a collection of Baldwin’s public speeches—many from recordings he has located and transcribed himself—to be published in 2027 by the Library of America, adding a new volume to its Baldwin canon. Darker than Blue is expected in 2028.
The art of the humanities
Before leaving Gloria Karefa-Smart’s apartment with her brothers’ letters in 2010, Pavlić made her a promise to “keep the faith.”
“This work, as it’s turned out over the last 15 years, has developed dimensions that, back then, neither she nor I understood,” he says. “But I’m not aware of my deviation from that agreement by a single iota.
“I think Gloria in some way intuited and understood that idea. ‘This guy’s really invested in a way that resonates with me … and I’m going to bring him along with me here in a way that I’m not doing with other people,’” Pavlić recalls. “What I’ve learned is, you just don’t walk up on a project like that and do it. It’s a great deal of preparation and luck, happenstance and also failure, and disappointment, and closed doors, and recriminations. I mean, it is a very full-dimensional human process.”
In a way, for Pavlić, all of this speaks to the “full-spectrum” nature of humanities research. “It’s history, it’s sociology, it’s cultural criticism, it’s literary theory, it’s Black biography, it’s the history of the church, it’s Harlem.”
But that isn’t all, as Karefa-Smart realized more than 15 years ago.
“It’s also got its crucial lyrical dimensions,” Pavlić says. “I’ve spent my time developing a certain expertise in that area as well, and that makes me sensitive to, and able to trace dimensions of, Baldwin’s story that exist in lyrical space, or lyrical form, or lyrical rhythm, whatever that is. That’s not something everybody can pick up.
“If you’re going to tell the story of a life, there’s a whole lot of stuff that goes into that.”
In the end, Karefa-Smart was probably right. It takes a poet.
A Sidewalk Tour of James Baldwin’s Manhattan with Ed Pavlić
