Sonny's Blues
by James Baldwin(1957)
Short Storyc. 20 pages
“For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard.”
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One great work, every day
by James Baldwin(1957)
“For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard.”
James Baldwin(1957)
The narrator, a Harlem schoolteacher, learns that his younger brother Sonny, a jazz musician, has been arrested for heroin. James Baldwin's 1957 story moves between past and present, between brothers who have chosen different paths through suffering. The final scene, in a nightclub where Sonny plays piano, achieves a vision of art as redemption that is earned by everything that has come before. Baldwin's prose has its own music. The story is one of the finest in American literature.