Augie Reads 2019-2020: Between the World and Me

This poem, which inspired the title of Coates’s book, portrays the aftermath of a lynching. Coates includes a passage from the poem as an epigraph at the beginning of the book, which addresses similar themes of how American society subjects black people to violence.

Coates draws inspiration from poetry and books by Richard Wright, an African-American author who wrote his best known works in the 1930s and '40s. Coates borrows the title of his book from Wright, and cites books such as Native Son throughout Between the World and Me. Wright’s views on race were often more dark than hopeful, and he was seen by some as writing to a primarily white audience, critiques Coates has faced as well. This page on Wright comes from Modern American Poetry, a website that collects historical information and literary analysis.

The piece by Baldwin that most obviously influenced Between the World and Me is Baldwin's “Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of Emancipation,” which became the opening portion of his book, The Fire Next Time, in 1963. An important concept in both works is innocence. As you read, think about what Baldwin means by “innocence,” and how that compares to Coates. This version of Baldwin’s letter comes from the website of Progressive magazine, which first published it as a standalone piece of writing in 1962.

In this interview, published by the British newspaper The Guardian, Coates explains how James Baldwin came to influence his work.

Not everyone fully agrees with the comparison between Coates and Baldwin. In this article for New York magazine, arts and culture writer Vinson Cunningham explains why he thinks “the differences between the two … are actually more revealing than the similarities.”