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BALDWIN

Nicholas Boggs

A Love Story

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 relationshipsgeographical, cultural, political, artistic, and eroticand 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.

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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Published 2025-08-19 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux

Comments

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.

"Magnificent.Nicholas Boggs' Baldwin is a formidable achievement, beautifully written, engrossing, and extremely intimate. Boggs' long journey as the biographer becomes a wild and most improbable treasure hunt where he unearths more than one poignant love story. James Baldwin's life is revealed in all its triumphs and agonies."

FR: Seuil

Through this gloriously written and exhaustively researched page-turner of a biography, I've just spent the past few weeks moving through the 20th century with one of the world's most brilliant writers. I'm better for it.