Could there ever be another James Baldwin? It’s probably miraculous that we even got to have the one. Who else, before or since, could write like someone who was born poor in Harlem, lived in Paris, absorbed the cadences of the Black church, read every word of Henry James, worked on the railroad and hung out with Marlon Brando?

Baldwin was also a product and a catalyst of his times. His first collection of essays came out in 1955 and he continued publishing into the 1980s; there was no more urgent and productive time to be writing eloquently and provocatively about the Black experience in America. Probably no more incendiary time, either. As a consequence of his writings, Baldwin’s FBI file ran to almost 2,000 pages.

He also happened to come to prominence during a time when there was still such a thing as a public intellectual in American culture. Baldwin debated William F. Buckley on TV and talked about racial justice to hosts like Dick Cavett on network talk shows. He made the cover of Time magazine. If you turned on a talk show or picked up a magazine in 2023 you were more likely to see someone like Pedro Pascal or Zendaya—which, no shade, love them both—but neither is usually likely to launch into a discourse about collective responsibility and the American dream. And it’s hard to picture Baldwin getting invited to sip coffee on The View.

Optimizing the opportunities afforded him by his innate gifts and historical moment, Baldwin emerged as a towering figure in American culture. His prodigious rhetorical and imaginative genius inspired successive creators like Ta-Nehisi Coates, Barry Jenkins, Isabel Wilkerson and Claudia Rankine. 2024 was the 100th anniversary of Baldwin’s birth, and there’s no better way to wrap up his centenary year than to spend some time in the company of his intricate and expressive prose, whether that be in the influential essays of The Fire Next Time or the groundbreaking depiction of same-sex love in Giovanni’s Room. And if that’s not enough, pick up The Fire This Time to see what it looks like when contemporary writers pick up Baldwin’s torch and run with it.