ash; who had become ill and died of tuberculosis shortly before his 19th birthday; as noted on Baldwin's essay Notes of A Native Son.
             Baldwin moved to Greenwich Village, known for its artists and writers, shortly after his father died where he devoted himself to writing a novel. Through a friend, he was able to land a fellowship in 1945 to cover his expenses while he wrote.
             His writings and another fellowship led him to Paris, where he began to write about life as a black man in America. Baldwin believed in France, he could write freely and honestly; something he could not do in Harlem. By 1953, he had completed his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, a story loosely based on his life growing up in Harlem. It is ranked 39th on Modern Library's 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. A year later, he received a Guggenheim fellowship. In 1956, he wrote Giovanni's Room, one of the first novels to tackle homosexuality. Around the same time, Baldwin began writing for the stage, eventually leading to Broadway.
             It was Baldwin's essays that established him as a leader of the Civil Rights Movement. Notes of a Native Son, in 1955 and Nobody Knows My Name: Mo
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