By any measure, the years covered in Amiri Baraka [LeRoi Jones]’s

(1960-1965) were tumultuous ones. Cold War tensions threatened to boil over during the Cuban Missile Crisis, President Kennedy was assassinated, and the war in Vietnam began to escalate dramatically. The Civil Rights movement was in full swing in the United States, and anti-colonial struggles were being waged across the globe. These years constitute a turbulent period in Baraka’s own life as well, the so-called “transitional period” (Harris 1991: xxi) that saw his transformation from beat poet to black nationalist. By 1965, Baraka had made his final break with the Greenwich Village bohemian milieu that had fostered his earliest work. He had left his first wife, Hettie Cohen, and moved uptown to…

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Citation: Fazzino, Jimmy. "Home". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 14 September 2011 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=4673, accessed 23 November 2024.]