Another Country, by James Baldwin

Baldwin’s third novel starts with Rufus Scott, a jazz musician, standing near Times Square, broke with nowhere to go. We don’t need to be told he is black; Baldwin accomplishes that with a simple, economical sentence: “The policeman passed him, giving him a look.”

Once well-known with many friends, a loving family, and numerous lovers, now he is “one of the fallen—for the weight of this city was murderous.” He believes he has only one friend left, Vivaldo, a writer laboring over his first nove...