Writer James Baldwin is not easily categorized.

Born into poverty in 1924, he became a major novelist, playwright, literary essayist, poet and civil rights activist. He was an inspiration, friend and collaborator to an entire generation of writers, scholars, activists and artists, from Martin Luther King Jr. and Toni Morrison to Henry Louis Gates Jr., Nina Simone, Richard Avedon and Maya Angelou.

Baldwin, who died in 1987, left behind 23 books and many other writings. His variegated legacy is still being parsed by scholars, five of whom weighed in on Baldwin's life and work at a symposium Nov. 8 at Cornell's Africana Studies and Research Center.

"There is a kind of innocence in Baldwin's work, and over the past decade there have been some wonderful anthologies and essays and scholarship that considers him anew," said Dagmawi Woubshet, assistant professor of English, who organized the event and teaches a graduate seminar on Baldwin. "A lot of scholars are rethinking and recasting Baldwin's work."

Symposium participants discussed some of the lessons learned from Baldwin in regard to race, sexuality, transnationalism, civil rights and the rise of Barack Obama.

"Even though he had a cosmopolitan life, we think about [Baldwin] as embodying the American dream," Woubshet said. "I'm reminded how so ahead of his time Baldwin was. We borrowed our vocabulary for talking about social politics, about identity politics, about cultural, sexual and national politics, all from Baldwin."

Baldwin's works include "Go Tell It on the Mountain" (1953), his semiautobiographical first novel; the essay collection "Notes of a Native Son" (1955); and "Giovanni's Room" (1956), which was controversial for its homoeroticism.

"There is so much vision in his work; he makes himself so vulnerable in his essays," Woubshet said. "As readers, he frees us to take inventory of our own lives, because he makes it so naked on the page."

Robert Reid-Pharr of the City University of New York Graduate Center wondered: "Would Baldwin have been greater if he had not lived so fully?"

"Martin Luther King and Malcolm X helped to inaugurate the modern public intellectual," Reid-Pharr said. "Baldwin complicates that view and politicizes it; [it] brought to mind for me the complexity of black modernity and the irony of sentimentalizing him, especially because he was so critical of sentimentality."

Eleanor Traylor of Howard University, who befriended Baldwin in the 1970s, discussed her reading of "Giovanni's Room," connecting story to theory while praising its narrative and tying Baldwin to such writers as Chinua Achebe, D.H. Lawrence, James Fenimore Cooper, W.E.B. Dubois and Alexis de Tocqueville.

"Every generation must decide what is human," she said. "The map that James Baldwin provides, that marks the heart's journey."

Traylor was a visiting lecturer in residence at the Africana Center in 1980, the year Baldwin came to Cornell for a lecture.

During that visit, "he came here and sat and talked and hung out and drank," said Professor James Turner, the Africana Center's first director.

"He was so companionable," Traylor said. "Whenever he found a supportive gathering of people, he tarried awhile."

Other scholars participating in the symposium were Marlon Ross, University of Virginia; Rinaldo Walcott, University of Toronto; and Michelle Wright, University of Minnesota.

"With these five scholars, I was very fortunate," Woubshet said. "They were my ideal five, and all of them accepted."

Callaloo, the African diaspora literary journal, will publish proceedings from the symposium in an upcoming issue, with an essay by Woubshet that is also included in the Fall 2008 English at Cornell newsletter.

The symposium was presented by the Department of English and the Africana Center, and co-sponsored by the Department of American Studies and the Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies Program.