After its initial publication in 1976 and puzzled critical reception, a new edition of James Baldwin’s children’s book, Little Man, Little Man, has been published by Duke University Press. The story is told from the viewpoint of a four-year-old boy named TJ, who faces growing up in a Harlem neighborhood stricken by police brutality and addiction.

“After it went out of print, Little Man, Little Man, received scant attention from scholars, who largely overlooked it as an inconsequential footnote to Baldwin’s towering literary legacy,” wrote Alexandra Alter in The New York Times. The experimental, genre-subversive project received lukewarm reviews during its first run in 1976. “If it had not been written by James Baldwin, I doubt that it would deserve more than a mention in a reviewers’ roundup of recent books,” wrote Julius Lester for The New York Times in 1977. “Children’s literature is a province of its own, a fact which the literati do not take seriously enough.”

Still, some argue that the appropriate audience for Baldwin’s occasionally jarring picture book existed forty years in the future. In the afterward of the new edition, Aisha Karefa-Smart, Baldwin’s niece, writes “When it came out, people weren’t ready for it, and now people are… My uncle’s voice, his ability to speak to the challenges that many of us face in America with regard to race, has come back into the national consciousness.”

Karefa-Smart, in collaboration with scholars Nicholas T. Boggs and Jennifer DeVere Brody, were the driving agents behind the book’s republishing. Boggs, a clinical assistant professor at New York University, began a campaign to republish the book in 2003, and eventually contacted the story’s original illustrator, Yoran Cazac. Boggs also recruited Karefa-Smart into the collaboration, as well as Baldwin’s nephew, Tejan Karefa-Smart, who inspired the character of TJ.

“I was already a huge Baldwin fan, but I’d never heard of it before,” said Boggs. ”I quickly became convinced it needed to be back out in the world and I’ve been working towards that end, in one way or another, ever since.”

“Now that we have a children’s book, we can start people off even younger,” said children’s book author Jacqueline Woodson in The New York Times’ story. “It’s a book that young people can read or have read to them, but it’s also a new Baldwin for adults.”

Photo Credit: Duke University Press