NEW YORK, NY.- Among the 20 artifacts at the 42nd Street Public Library commemorating the centenary of James Baldwin, the novelist, essayist and playwright who died in 1987, two typewritten sheets seem startlingly site-specific. They suggest that had Baldwin given in to his childhood fears, America’s great watchman of race and alienation might never have stepped foot into the Manhattan building at all.

In one of these pages, from a draft of “Go Tell It on the Mountain” (1953) — his debut novel recounting the Harlem boyhood he spent torn between literature and the Black church — Baldwin describes a journey down Fifth Avenue, past “the stone lions that guarded the Library, a building filled with books and unimaginably vast, and which he had never yet dared to enter.” As if to crank up his intimidation, Baldwin added, in pen, the phrase “great main building of the Public” before the word “Library,” which is how it reads today.

The other is from “Letter From a Region in My Mind,” his roiling 1962 essay on racism, reprinted in his breakout book, “The Fire Next Time” (1963). “I was thirteen,” this page reads, “and crossing Fifth Avenue on my way to the Forty-second street library, and the cop in the middle of avenue muttered, as I passed him, Why don’t you niggers stay uptown where you belong?”

Bigotry notwithstanding, Baldwin became a fixture at the main library on 42nd Street in adolescence and a poster child of self-won erudition. Which makes a proper homecoming of the 42nd Street display and its companion exhibition of 45 artifacts at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, a division of the Public Library in Harlem that Baldwin said he had exhausted in his teenage years.

Both exhibitions pull from the Baldwin papers that the Schomburg acquired, to much fanfare, in 2017. At times the shows are padded with book covers and photographs that were already available online — Baldwin in gingham on a march with Joan Baez, Baldwin in Façonnable with Chinua Achebe — but they also give rare public exhibition to a number of emended typescripts, longhand notes and letters that illuminate Baldwin’s animating anxieties. Paired with, say, the Library of America’s new Baldwin box set, the shows are a terrific use of a weekend.

Not everything talks, though. Like Baldwin’s 1964 datebook containing his doodles of fish and a human face — his own? — displayed at the Schomburg without curatorial comment. I remember seeing, at the Morgan Library in 2018, the address book of Baldwin’s friend and unrequited crush, Marlon Brando. Its flyleaf inscription — “I beg you on bended knee to return this” — instantly conveyed the actor’s roguish charm.

No such reveal here. The elephant in these two rooms is the seal that Baldwin’s estate placed on his most sensitive letters — to three friends and his brother David — until the year 2037, as a condition of its sale of the archive to the library in 2017. This hinders any conscientious biographer, or curator.

It’s nice to see the French legal pads containing Baldwin’s notes and early drafts, and the telltale ink smudges of a left-hand writer. But Baldwin already bared so much of himself, especially his fraught childhood, in his publications. The remaining mysteries — the self-doubts, crises and attachments noted by his early biographer, David Leeming — are of a much deeper sort than can be conveyed in an exhibition.

Still, there are breadcrumbs. At the 42nd Street display, selected by Charles Cuykendall Carter, an assistant curator at the library, we find a 1955 postcard to painter Beauford Delaney, in which Baldwin promises that a “letter follows, then me,” while in Washington for the opening of his play “The Amen Corner.” Raised by a forbidding and bitter preacher stepfather, Baldwin found a surrogate in the elder Delaney, and left Greenwich Village for France in 1948, where Delaney later followed, to find his voice away from America and its racial obsessions.

Another mentorship was spoiled when Baldwin dismantled Richard Wright’s novel “Native Son” (1940), and Black protest literature generally, in a 1949 essay, later collected in “Notes of a Native Son” (1955). Wright, formerly Baldwin’s champion, never forgave him for the essay. At the Schomburg, a Playboy spread containing Baldwin’s article “Words of a Native Son” (1964) reminds us that Baldwin continued to mull that book years after Wright’s death.

Baldwin broadened the fixation on skin color in his magisterial novel “Another Country” (1962), where homosexuality, infidelity, exile and careerism collide — via some very memorable love triangles — into a crisis of American self-knowledge, of which race is only one pressure point. The Schomburg display, curated by Barrye Brown, contains a 1961 letter to Lorraine Hansberry in which Baldwin worries “my grim interracial drama” might not ring true. Time proved him wrong.

The first-edition dust jacket for “Notes of a Native Son,” displayed at 42nd Street, captions a photograph of a slightly slouchy Baldwin as “The Author,” as if such eloquent prose from a nonwhite pen — Baldwin’s blend of Victorian momentum, Pentecostal angst and newsman’s declaratives — required evidence up front. In the show’s online commentary, scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. recalls that cover photo teaching him in childhood “that Black people, too, could write books.”

Although careful with his allegiances — claiming racists must be accepted “with love” — Baldwin could also spit fire about white supremacy, and he maintained a friendship with Malcolm X until his assassination in 1965. It was a forceful side of Baldwin rather absent from these displays.

At the Schomburg there is a draft page recounting Baldwin’s failed attempt, in the employ of Columbia Pictures, to soften Malcolm X’s autobiography enough for the screen — a page from what would become his memoir of his experiences watching movies, “The Devil Finds Work” (1976). Nearby is a 1975 letter to Maya Angelou and her husband, Paul du Feu, about the “abominable post-natal depression” Baldwin felt upon finishing that memoir.

As an institutional advertisement, these two shows succeed brilliantly. They tease the great value of the Public Library’s Baldwin’s holdings, which — aside from the sealed letters — are open for research at the Schomburg. So I made an appointment and went through five boxes’ worth.

In my dig I found Baldwin’s plea to Brando asking for his help with an unnamed screenplay. They hatched several film ideas together, none realized. “It’s your misfortune,” Baldwin typed to his friend, “to be the only man on earth whom I feel I can call on.”

In 1966, “Today” show host Hugh Downs wrote Baldwin a long letter pledging himself to the study of racism. In reply Baldwin, by then a national icon much in demand for televised debates, confessed that he was “profoundly demoralized” by having to chronicle that issue, his talent “engulfed in the sewers of the Social Cause.”

In 1967, Alex Haley, co-author of Malcolm X’s autobiography, reassures Baldwin about the subject of his ill-fated screenplay. “It’s interesting to me that you say your relationship with Malcolm was often a little strained,” Haley observes in careful felt pen, “because you are one of the few people of whom he ever expressed to me direct admiration.”

Most telling was an instance of ghosting. Throughout 1955, Baldwin ignored Sol Stein, his high school classmate who had become his editor, delaying his promised introduction to Arnold Rose’s “The Negro in America,” which Stein was reissuing at Beacon Press. After months without delivery, Stein explodes, accusing Baldwin of succumbing to a crippling fixation on his Harlem childhood.

“What are you punishing yourself for? It’s all over. Father is dead,” Stein writes of the preacher stepfather who often occupied Baldwin’s prose, “and you’ve polished his ebony bones fine in Notes.” Baldwin resurfaces, miffed. “Please get over the notion, Sol, that there’s some place I’ll fit when I’ve made some ‘real peace’ with myself,” he writes from France in 1956. “The place in which I’ll fit will not exist until I make it.”

By his final decade, Baldwin had made that place. He had been both case study and examiner of the effects of ostracism, now wielding a sagely sort of nuance in essays like “Letter to Prisoners” (1983), an early draft of which is on view at the Schomburg: “What artists and prisoners have in common,” he writes, “is that they both know what it means to be free.”

My archive dig yielded two very diplomatic letters from 1977 and ’78 by a young Gates, then a doctoral student at Yale, asking the elder Baldwin if he would like to sell his papers to that university.

“I didn’t even remember these letters,” Gates told me when I reached him by phone. But they jogged his memory of when Baldwin visited Yale to discuss the offer. “I took Baldwin over to the Beinecke library,” Gates recalled. Coincidentally Yale had just acquired Wright’s papers, including Wright’s 1945 letter securing Baldwin his first crucial grant money. Gates said he offered to show Baldwin the letter: “‘If I can show you that, would you let us purchase your papers?’ He said yes. When I showed him the entry in the card catalog and asked if he wanted me to have the librarians retrieve it, with great emotion he said, ‘No, no, it would be too much!’ And with that, we slowly walked back to my office.”

Was Baldwin consumed by guilt? Inadequacy? Questions about this very public icon still abound, and his birthday exhibitions make that tantalizing fact clear. “A city which does not believe in personal monuments really has no right to public ones,” Baldwin observed in an undated memo about New York I noticed in my dig. Whatever the current restrictions, the acquisition of his archive by a public institution is indeed a monument. It belongs to anyone with a library card and the will to use it.

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‘Jimmy! God’s Black Revolutionary Mouth’: Through Feb. 28, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, 515Malcolm X Blvd., Manhattan; 917-275 6975; nypl.org/locations/Schomburg

‘James Baldwin: Mountain to Fire’: Through winter 2024, Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, 476 Fifth Ave., Manhattan; 917-275-6975; nypl.org/locations/schwarzman

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.