Baldwin: A Love Story

Author:	Boggs, Nicholas
Binding:	Hardcover
List Price:	$36.00
Our Price:	$4.75 USD
Sale Price:	4.27 USD
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Additional Info
Overview

ISBN:	9780374178710
Publisher:	Farrar Straus Giroux
Language:	English
Page Count:	710
Publication Date:	8/19/2025
Size:	9.50" l x 6.50" w x 2.13"
Series:	N/A

Category	Subject
Biography & Autobiography	Cultural, Ethnic and Regional
Biography & Autobiography	Literary

AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

2026 Winner of the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography

A New York Times Notable Book

2025 Goodreads Choice Award Finalist for Best History & Biography

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.