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.

Advance Praise

“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 

"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, 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, MacArthur Fellow and National Book Award winner for Brown Girl Dreaming

“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

“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

“Nicholas Boggs 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 intimate friendships, this epic biography captures Baldwin in full. Highly recommended!”
—Douglas Brinkley, Katherine Tsanoff Brown Chair in Humanities and professor of history at Rice University, author of Rosa Parks: A Life