Baldwin: A Love Story
by Nicholas Boggs
This title was previously available on NetGalley and is now archived.
Send NetGalley books directly to your Kindle or Kindle app
1
To read on a Kindle or Kindle app, please add kindle@netgalley.com as an approved email address to receive files in your Amazon account. Click here for step-by-step instructions.
2
Also find your Kindle email address within your Amazon account, and enter it here.
Pub Date Aug 19 2025 | Archive Date Sep 19 2025
Talking about this book? Use #BaldwinALoveStory #NetGalley. More hashtag tips!
Description
AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
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.
A Note From the Publisher
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.
Advance Praise
"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 his 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
“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, author of Black in Blues
"Nicholas Boggs’s meticulously researched and passionately written Baldwin: A Love Story 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 sex life and friendships, in particular with painters Beauford Delaney and Lucien Happersberger, this epic biography captures Baldwin in full. I especially admire Boggs’s excavation of the intrepid Baldwin’s Istanbul and Paris years. Highly recommended!!" —Douglas Brinkley, author of Rosa Parks: A Life
“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: A Love Story 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
Available Editions
| EDITION | Other Format |
| ISBN | 9780374178710 |
| PRICE | $36.00 (USD) |
| PAGES | 704 |
Available on NetGalley
Average rating from 30 members
Readers who liked this book also liked:
© 2025 NetGalley LLC
• All Rights Reserved
