Another Country

Another Country, novel by James Baldwin, published in 1962. The novel is renowned for its frank portrayal of bisexuality and interracial relations, published in a time when these subjects were taboo.

(Learn more about James Baldwin’s fiction in Britannica’s essay “13 LGBTQ Writers You Should Read.”)

Shortly after the action begins, Rufus Scott, a Black jazz musician in New York City, commits suicide, impelling his friends to search for the meaning of his death and, consequently, for a deeper understanding of their own identities. Employing a loose, episodic structure that has often been compared to that of Beat movement novels, this work traces the affairs—heterosexual and homosexual as well as interracial—among Scott’s friends. In its language and structure, the novel is a departure from Baldwin’s earlier work.