'Baldwin was 33 in 1957, when he published his short story Sonny’s Blues, and it might be said that the whole of his lifetime went into the story. Readers today coming for the first time to this tale of Harlem life and heroin addiction might view it in contemporary terms, and there’s no harm in that: the messages in the story are as evergreen as the biblical allusions Baldwin uses in the story. But it is also worth recalling that in 1957 there was no Civil Rights Act, the struggle over Jim Crow laws and segregation had a long way to go, and racial conditions and inequalities were deplorable and disregarded by most white Americans.'
https://www.theguardian.com/books/article/2024/aug/02/where-to-start-with-james-baldwin