James Baldwin, Simone de Beauvoir, and the “New Vocabulary” of Existentialist Ethics

James Baldwin wrote that his essay “Everybody’s Protest Novel” marked “a beginning of my finding a new vocabulary and another point of view.” This article explores the striking similarities between the new ethical vocabulary in Baldwin’s early Paris essays and that of Simone de Beauvoir’s emerging existentialist ethics, particularly in their use of a coming-of-age metaphor to talk in moral terms about innocence, guilt, and responsibility. Reading these two authors together illuminates both Beauvoir’s unique characterization of existentialism and its influence on Baldwin’s mature thought.