Baldwin’s career recapitulates the same pursuit in differently voiced keys like Coltrane’s.

Evidence

Reading The Fire Next Time alongside No Name in the Street, for example, reminds me of listening to John Coltrane’s “Pursuance,” the third part of his classic album A Love Supreme. Taking the same notes, rotating them, and using a different tonal framework, Coltrane frantically pursues enlightenment, and one gets the feeling as one listens that he is playing the same thing over and over again even when the solo is at its most dissonant. For me, reading Baldwin throughout his career feels like this: a manic pursuit of a radically different way of being in the world, where “niggers” and the white people who need them no longer exist. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Begin Again, 65

Categorization

• XREF: The Coltrane metaphor is the most vivid articulation of how to read early and late Baldwin as one continuous pursuit — a key tool for the recanonization essay.
• CANDY: The Coltrane ‘Pursuance’ comparison is an elegant, tweetable encapsulation of how to read Baldwin’s career.