Reading Order
Another Country Reading Order
James Baldwin's Another Country (1962) is a complete standalone novel. It begins with the suicide of Rufus Scott, a Black jazz drummer in New York, and follows the large and interconnected cast of his friends — Black and white, gay and straight, American and French — as they try to understand what happened and to live with what they themselves are. Set in Greenwich Village and Harlem in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and in Paris, it is Baldwin's most ambitious and formally complex novel.
Where to start
Another Country
Complete Another Country Book List
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Another Country
James Baldwin·1962·Standalone — New York after the suicide of jazz drummer Rufus Scott; a large cast of Black and white, gay and straight characters trying to live with what they are; Baldwin's most ambitious novel, big and unruly and passionate - Buy
If Beale Street Could Talk
OptionalJames Baldwin·1974·Baldwin's most tender novel — Tish and Fonny in Harlem; more concentrated and accessible than Another Country; a good companion or introduction if Another Country's scale feels large - Buy
Giovanni's Room
OptionalJames Baldwin·1956·Baldwin's second novel — an American man in Paris in love with an Italian bartender; the shorter and more formally controlled companion piece to Another Country on the subject of what desire costs when society forbids it
Another Country — Frequently Asked Questions
Is Another Country a standalone?
Yes — Another Country is entirely self-contained. James Baldwin's other novels — Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), Giovanni's Room (1956), If Beale Street Could Talk (1974) — are independent works not connected in plot or character to Another Country.
Is Another Country difficult to read?
Another Country is the most formally ambitious of Baldwin's novels — its large cast, multiple storylines, and long sections in the points of view of different characters make demands that his shorter novels do not. Many readers find the Paris section (Part III) less absorbing than the New York sections. It is worth the effort: nothing else in Baldwin's fiction has quite the scale of ambition or the range of human experience that Another Country attempts.
What is Another Country about?
Another Country begins with the suicide of Rufus Scott, a Black jazz drummer, and the rest of the novel examines the people he left behind — his sister Ida, his white friend Vivaldo, Vivaldo's girlfriend Cass, Cass's husband Richard, the white Southern writer Eric who is returning from France. The novel explores how race and sexuality intersect in mid-century New York: almost every relationship in the novel crosses either a racial or a sexual boundary (or both), and Baldwin uses those crossings to examine what America asks its citizens to deny about themselves and each other.
Was Another Country controversial when it was published?
Another Country was one of the most controversial novels of its moment. It dealt explicitly with interracial sex and same-sex desire in ways that American fiction had rarely attempted, and it was frank about the racial politics of desire in a way that made white readers as uncomfortable as Black readers. It was a bestseller despite — or because of — its notoriety. Norman Mailer, one of Baldwin's main literary rivals, wrote about it at length; the two had a complex and sometimes hostile relationship that Another Country inflamed.
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