Behind James Baldwin's uncanny ability to evoke a nation's crisis and potential hope lies his use of religious language to describe social and sexual transformation. The first study of its kind, James Baldwin and the Heavenly City shows that Baldwin's novels use biblical ideas in partly but not fully secularized ways to express the possible human attainment of a new life embodying a real but undefinable holiness. This important work provides new readings of Baldwin's novels, reassesses his once-neglected later fiction, and shows Gospel music's centrality (with blues) in his fictional imagination.

CHRISTOPHER Z. HOBSON is Professor of English at SUNY Old Westbury and author of The Mount of Vision: African American Prophetic Tradition, 1800-1950; Blake and Homosexuality; and other works on African American literature and culture, William Blake, and political theory.