You don't know how much I needed to hear from you. I wanted to write you many a time but I dug how much I must have hurt you and so I didn't write. But now I feel like a man who's been trying to climb up out of some deep, really deep and funky hole and just saw the sun up there, outside. I got to get outside.

The essay was originally publiJames Baldwind in two oversized issues of The New Yorker and landed Baldwin on the cover of Time magazine in 1963 while Baldwin was touring the South speaking about the restive Civil Rights movement. Baldwin also provided her with literary. He became for me an example of courage and integrity humility and passion.

Some Baldwin essays are book-length for instance The Fire Next Time (1963) No Name in the Street (1972) and The Devil Finds Work (1976). Baldwin's best-known novel is his first Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953).