The Outing

James Baldwin

Jul 2014 · Sold by Vintage

About this ebook

In James Baldwin’s classic short story, “The Outing,” from Going to Meet the Man, a Harlem church group escapes the city for a summer day-trip of prayer and, more importantly, romance.  

Every summer, the Harlem Mount of Olives Pentecostal Assembly gives an outing, around the Fourth of July. There is boating, testifying, and illicit steps towards young love. Delving deeply into the church community he would depict in Go Tell It On The Mountain, this is Baldwin at his most compassionate, investigating the sexual ambivalence and towering religion of a group of young children on their way up the Hudson. “The Outing” is the perfect introduction to an American master.   

An eBook short.

Ratings and reviews

James uses a promiscuous mood here to reveal what all young people of both sex had to deal with this particular time.

About the author

James Baldwin was born in 1924 and educated in New York. He is the author of more than twenty works of fiction and nonfiction, including Go Tell It on the Mountain, Notes of a Native Son, Giovanni’s Room, Nobody Knows My Name, Another Country, and The Fire Next Time. Among the awards he received are a Eugene F. Saxon Memorial Trust Award, a Rosenwald Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Partisan Review Fellowship, and a Ford Foundation grant. He was made a Commander of the Legion of Honor in 1986. Baldwin died in 1987.