Baldwin: A Love Story
by Nicholas Boggs
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Pub Date Aug 19 2025 | Archive Date Sep 19 2025
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Description
Drawing on new archival material, original research, and interviews, this spellbinding book is the first major biography of James Baldwin in three decades, revealing how profoundly his personal relationships shaped his life and work.
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.
A Note From the Publisher
Available Editions
| EDITION | Other Format |
| ISBN | 9780374178710 |
| PRICE | $35.00 (USD) |
| PAGES | 704 |
Available on NetGalley
Featured Reviews
Richard P, Reviewer
In a world often filled with quick reads and subsequent reviews, it was a rather glorious experience to immerse myself in the 700+ page "Baldwin: A Love Story" by Nicholas Boggs.
Noted as the first major biography of James Baldwin in three decades, "Baldwin: A Love Story" reveals just how profoundly Baldwin's personal relationships impacted his life and his literary work.
Boggs taps into a wealth of new archival material, original research, interviews, and his own remarkable narration to paint an immersive story that you never want to leave. For those who know Baldwin's life, such names as Beauford Delaney, Lucien Happersberger, Engin Cezzar, and Yoran Cazac will be familiar yet still likely somewhat mysterious. Somehow, Boggs brings them all wondrously to life in a way that feels remarkably true to the essence of the Baldwin we've long known and the Baldwin we've perhaps never known.
While "Baldwin: A Love Story" is a remarkable effort as a biography, it's perhaps even more remarkable for Boggs's ability to capture this masterful writer's writing process and how it was shaped and developed and nurtured by his relationships whether they be lovers, intimate friends, muses, or mentors.
"Baldwin: A Love Story" unfolds leisurely, lyrically really, and with the rhythms of creative life fully lived in all its complexities. Boggs possesses a subtle narrative voice that illustrates how Baldwin was shaped by the structures within relationships - cultural forces, political movements, artistry, geography and, of course, the erotic. This is an uncompromisingly intimate story that invites us to observe and be shaped by that intimacy in profound ways. While reading, I often felt as if I could see Baldwin in front of me as his many masterpieces unfolded like "Giovanni's Room," "The Fire Next Time," "If Beale Street Could Talk," "Go Tell It on the Mountain" and so many others. This feels like a sublime companion to the riveting documentary "I Am Not Your Negro," and it's a book I've been unable to stop thinking about since I wound down my time with it after two weeks of slow, intentional, and immersive reading.
Indeed, "Baldwin: A Love Story" isn't a quick read. Beyond its over 700-page length, Boggs offers up so many layers of Baldwin you're scared to rush through it for fear of missing an essential fact or story. For Baldwin fans, "Baldwin: A Love Story" is a must-read. For those wanting an in-depth yet lyrical trip through a master writer's creative journey, this is a book to not be missed.
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