God Made My Face: A Collective Portrait of James Baldwin

"While a student at PS 139 (Frederick Douglass Junior High School) in Harlem, Baldwin studied French with Countee Cullen, a leading poet of the Harlem Renaissance. Baldwin’s interest in France and its culture was further cemented by his obsession with A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens’s tale of the French Revolution."

"Nearly half a century before the then twenty-four-year-old Baldwin emigrated to Paris, in 1948, Eugène Atget (1857–1927) had spent years photographing aspects of nineteenth-century Parisian life as the city gave way to the twentieth century. Indeed, Baldwin was to spend a great deal of time writing and living in cafes and hotels situated on avenues and streets Atget had visited with his camera, including the rue Vieille du Temple, in the Marais, a neighborhood that figures in the author’s second novel, Giovanni’s Room (1956). Some years before, while still living in New York, Baldwin and his high school classmate, the photographer Richard Avedon, thought to collaborate on a book called Harlem Doorways, a project that was never fully realized, but evoked Atget’s interest in doorways, arches, and arcades." 
—Hilton Als