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Drawing on new archival material and original research and interviews, this spellbinding biography reveals how profoundly James Baldwin's personal relationships shaped his life and work.
As the first major biography of the iconic figure in more than three decades, Baldwin: A Love Story tells the overlapping stories of Baldwin's most sustaining intimate and artistic relationships: with his mentor, the Black American painter Beauford Delaney; with his lover and muse, the Swiss painter Lucien Happersberger; and with his collaborators, the famed Turkish actor Engin Cezzar and the iconoclastic French artist Yoran Cazac.
With Nicholas Boggs's rich and subtle narration of Baldwin's public and personal stories and his lucid interpretation of Baldwin's work, this biography shows for the first time how Baldwin drew on complex structures within these relationships―geographical, cultural, political, artistic, and erotic―and alchemized them into art that spoke truth to power and had an indelible impact on the civil rights movement and on Black and queer literary history. In doing so, this book magnifies our understanding of one of the major literary and cultural figures of the twentieth century, whose contributions only continue to grow in influence.
2025 National Book Critics Circle Award Finalists
Here's the list of the 2025 National Book Critics Circle Award finalists. Which have you read and which are standouts? Are there any you'd like to add to your list that you haven't already? Autobiography/Memoir : Memorial Days by Geraldine Brooks (Viking) Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy ...
-kim.kovacs
Kirkus finalists announced!
FICTION https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-3077-0015-5 The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai (Hogarth) https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780063318779 The Wilderness by Angela Flournoy (Mariner Books) https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780593730089 Isola by Allegra Goodman (Dial Pres...
-kim.kovacs
"The author's rigorous research, including interviews with Cazac, makes for an impressive portrait of Baldwin's life and work. It's a fascinating and original window into the private world of one of America's greatest writers." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"In this comprehensive, emotional biography, Boggs positions Baldwin's romantic history squarely at the center of his literary and political work, chronicling the parallel developments in Baldwin's art and in his relationships...[A] rich and complex look at a writer who exemplifies the impossibility of separating the personal from the political." —Booklist (starred review)
"This vibrant new biography…establishes Baldwin as a restless writer who publicly "forced readers to confront the connections between white supremacy, masculinity, and sexuality" while privately seeking the 'redemptive power of love' with other men, gay, straight, and bisexual. A dynamic portrait that deepens our understanding of a complex artist." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"A virtuosic feat of literary imagination, rhapsodic and transportive. Stunningly, it answers not only the question of who James Baldwin was but how he made and remade his art and his world. Fast paced and, at times, movingly tender, with love palpable throughout, the total effect is symphonic. This book deserves a standing ovation." ―Ilyon Woo, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Master Slave Husband Wife
This information about Baldwin was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Nicholas Boggs is a writer and independent scholar. He rediscovered and coedited a new edition of James Baldwin's out-of-print collaboration with the French artist Yoran Cazac, Little Man, Little Man: A Story of Childhood (2018), and his writing has been anthologized in The Cambridge Companion to James Baldwin and James Baldwin Now. He is the recipient of a 2023 Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Beinecke Library and Gilder Lehrman Center at Yale, the Schomburg Center Scholars-in-Residence Program, and the National Humanities Center, as well as residencies at Yaddo and MacDowell. He received his BA in English from Yale, his MFA in creative writing from American University, and his PhD in English from Columbia. Born and raised in Washington, DC, he lives in Brooklyn, New York.
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