Demonstrating the intimate connections among our public, political, and personal lives, these essays by Robert Cantwell explore the vernacular culture of everyday life. A keen and innovative observer of American culture, Cantwell casts a broad and penetrating intelligence over the cultural functioning of popular texts, artefacts, and performers, examining how cultural practices become performances and how performances become artefacts endowed with new meaning through the transformative acts of imagination. Cantwell's points of departure range from the visual and the literary - a photograph of Woody Guthrie, or a poem by John Keats - to major cultural exhibitions such as the World's Columbian Exposition. In all these domains, he unravels the implications for community and cultural life of a continual migration, transformation, and reformulation of cultural content.

詹姆斯•鮑德溫（1924—1987），美國著名小說傢、散文傢、詩人、劇作傢和社會活動傢，生於紐約哈萊姆區，童年坎坷，生父有毒癮問題，後母親嫁給牧師大衛·鮑德溫，又生育八個孩子。一九三八年，受其嚴苛的繼父的影響，十四歲的鮑德溫成為瞭哈萊姆地區的一名牧師。十七歲時，鮑德溫決定脫離教會。

一九四八年，對美國的種族現實極度失望的鮑德溫選擇移居法國。一九五三年，鮑德溫齣版帶有自傳色彩的處女作小說《嚮蒼天呼籲》。此後的三十年裏，他陸續齣版《 土生子劄記》《喬瓦尼的房間》《另一個國度》《下一次將是烈火》《告訴我火車開走瞭多久》《假如比爾街可以作證》等二十多部作品。

一九五七年，鮑德溫迴到美國，投入當時如火如荼的黑人解放運動。一九八七年十二月一日， 鮑德溫因肺癌在法國南部去世。

《諾頓美國黑人文學選集》如是評價鮑德溫——“以優美的藝術性，通過將自己個人經曆中最隱秘的部分和國傢及世界命運中最廣泛的問題結閤起來，刺透瞭美國種族意識中的曆史性障礙。”