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

Home: Social Essays

(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…

1396 words

Citation: Fazzino, Jimmy. "Home". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 14 September 2011 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=4673, accessed 19 March 2024.]

4673 Home 3 Historical context notes are intended to give basic and preliminary information on a topic. In some cases they will be expanded into longer entries as the Literary Encyclopedia evolves.

Save this article

If you need to create a new bookshelf to save this article in, please make sure that you are logged in, then go to your 'Account' here

Leave Feedback

The Literary Encyclopedia is a living community of scholars. We welcome comments which will help us improve.