James Baldwin: A Love Story

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.

Nicholas Boggs is a writer and researcher who recovered 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. His work has been supported by fellowships from the Leon Levy Center for Biography, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Beinecke Library and Gilder Lehrman Center at Yale, and the Scholars-in-Residence Program at the Schomburg, as well as residencies at Yaddo and MacDowell. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.