Books like The Fire Next Time

A national bestseller when it first appeared in 1963, The Fire Next Time galvanized the nation and gave passionate voice to the emerging civil rights movement. At once a powerful evocation of James Baldwin’s early life in Harlem and a disturbing examination of the consequences of racial injustice, the book is an intensely personal and provocative document. It consists of two “letters,” written on the occasion of the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, that exhort Americans, both black and white, to attack the terrible legacy of racism. Described by The New York Times Book Review as “sermon, ultimatum, confession, deposition, testament, and chronicle…all presented in searing, brilliant prose,” The Fire Next Time stands as a classic of our literature.

Liked The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin? Here's what readers who loved it picked up next.

Soul on Ice by Eldridge Cleaver (1968) · 3.95★
The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois (1903) · 4.24★
Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates (2015) · 4.4★
The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X (1965) · 4.29★
Black Boy by Richard Wright (1945) · 4.02★
Disappearing Acts by Terry McMillan (1989) · 4.21★
for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf by Ntozake Shange (1975) · 4.27★
Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin (1960) · 4.12★
The Women of Brewster Place by Gloria Naylor (1982) · 4.13★
Up from Slavery by Booker T. Washington (1900) · 4.09★
The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison (1970) · 3.99★
Kaffir Boy: An Autobiography by Mark Mathabane (1986) · 4.15★