Baldwin: A Love Story

by Nicholas Boggs

Overview

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, the first major biography of James Baldwin in three decades, reveals how profoundly the writer’s personal relationships shaped his life and work. Drawing on newly uncovered archival material and original research and interviews, this spellbinding book 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, whose long-overlooked significance as Baldwin’s last great love is explored in these pages for the first time.

Nicholas Boggs shows how Baldwin drew on all the complex forces within these relationships—geographical, cultural, political, artistic, and erotic— and alchemized them into novels, essays, and plays that speak truth to power and had an indelible impact on the civil rights movement and on Black and queer literary history. Richly immersive, Baldwin: A Love Story follows the writer’s creative journey between Harlem, Paris, Switzerland, the southern United States, Istanbul, Africa, the South of France, and beyond. In so doing, it magnifies our understanding of the public and private lives of one of the major literary figures of the twentieth century, whose contributions only continue to grow in influence.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374178710
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	08/19/2025
Pages:	720
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.12(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Nicholas Boggs was an undergraduate when he discovered James Baldwin’s out-of-print children’s book, Little Man, Little Man: A Story of Childhood, in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. After he tracked down its illustrator, the French artist Yoran Cazac, he went on to coedit an acclaimed new edition of the book in 2018. His writing has also been anthologized in The Cambridge Companion to James Baldwin, James Baldwin Now, and Speculative Light: The Arts of Beauford Delaney and James Baldwin. 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.

Editorial Reviews

Nicholas Boggs’s monumental biography considers James Baldwin through the prism of love, placing four beloved men at the center of his writing, his activism, his political consciousness, his philosophy, and his life. We have been presented with many partial Baldwins over the years, but here is the whole loveable man: the radical and the celebrity, the civil rights hero and the downtown playwright, the cosmopolitan jet-setter and the son of East Harlem. Compulsively interesting and beautifully written—there is something to treasure on every page. I absolutely loved it.” —Zadie Smith

“Gorgeous. Nicholas Boggs’s storytelling, so tenderly rendered, brings us the beautiful yet tattered heart of not only Baldwin the intellectual and artist, but Baldwin the vulnerable, yearning, flesh-and-blood person. This book is so important and timely.” —Imani Perry, National Book Award winner for South to America

“Nicholas Boggs’s meticulously researched and passionately written Baldwin is the crown jewel of the ongoing James Baldwin revival. Boggs, in seamless fashion, vividly recounts the personal life of America’s brave Black novelist, essayist, gay liberation oracle, and civil rights activist. Replete with freshly unearthed revelations about Baldwin’s intimate relationships, this epic biography captures Baldwin in full. Highly recommended!” —Douglas Brinkley, Katherine Tsanoff Brown Chair in Humanities and professor of history at Rice University, and author of Rosa Parks: A Life

“James Baldwin spent his life being a witness to the world, and for the first time, in Baldwin: A Love Story, we are a witness to him. Nicholas Boggs shows us Baldwin’s brilliance, his desire to change the world, as well as his loneliness, his desire for domesticity, and his determination to leave something behind that would ultimately become our inheritance. So grateful for this stunning work.” —Lena Waithe, Emmy Award–winning writer, producer, and actor

“Through this gloriously written and exhaustively researched page-turner of a biography, I’ve just spent the past few weeks moving through the twentieth century with one of the world’s most brilliant writers. I’m better for it.” —Jacqueline Woodson, National Book Award winner and MacArthur Fellow

“Magnificent. Nicholas Boggs’s Baldwin is a formidable achievement, beautifully written, engrossing, and extremely intimate. Boggs’s 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.” —Kai Bird, Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer of J. Robert Oppenheimer

“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

“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.” —Lesley Williams, 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)

From the Publisher

★ 2025-05-02
Reenvisioning the life of a major 20th-century writer and civil rights icon.

The reputation of James Baldwin (1924-1987) waxed and waned over his lifetime—and beyond. He began as the promising young author of the novelGo Tell It on the Mountain (1953) and the essay collectionNotes of a Native Son (1955) before emerging as a crucial “witness” to the civil rights struggle, electrifying readers with his book-length essayThe Fire Next Time (1963). Yet his frank treatment of homosexuality in novels likeGiovanni’s Room (1956) andAnother Country (1962) discomfited publishers and critics, and he struck some younger Black radicals as passé. His late fiction was roundly (and unfairly) dismissed. In recent years, the advent of Black Lives Matter and a host of new critical studies have forced us to rethink Baldwin. The author of this vibrant new biography divides his “Love Story” into discrete sections named for four men in the subject’s life: painter Beauford Delaney, an early mentor and “spiritual father”; Lucien Happersberger, the Swiss man he called “the love of my life,” whose emotional support enabled him to completeGiovanni’s Room; Engin Cezzar, the Turkish actor and “blood brother” who offered refuge in Istanbul during the turbulent ’60s; and Yoran Cazac, an enigmatic French artist and collaborator onLittle Man, Little Man, a 1976 picture book. (Boggs played a decisive role in the book’s 2018 reissue and interrupts the narrative to recount his efforts to locate and interview Cazac, a backstory that might have been more effective as an afterword.) Boggs 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