It has been very exciting that a plethora of Baldwin archives have become available in the last three decades—at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale and at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, in particular. I was fortunate to receive fellowships at these institutions, which allowed me to spend months immersing myself in these materials. My book is the first biography to make such extensive use of their contents— including unpublished love poems, gorgeously composed personal letters, and fascinating drafts of Baldwin’s writing—and transform them into a narrative. I have also had the benefit of years of interviews I undertook with many people who knew Baldwin extremely well, including close friends and former lovers, several of whom had never spoken about their role in Baldwin’s life before. This allowed me to amass my own personal archive of Baldwin materials that will be making its way into the world for the first time, including some never-before-seen photographs. It’s a far more intimate Baldwin than we’ve ever known until now.

Back in 1996, as an undergraduate, I discovered Baldwin’s out-of-print “children’s book for adults,” Little Man, Little Man, at the Beinecke. Before he died in 2005, I tracked down the book’s illustrator, French artist Yoran Cazac, a mysterious but as it turns out major figure from Baldwin’s life in the 1970s: not only his collaborator, but also his muse and last great love, to whom he dedicated his novel If Beale Street Could Talk. Over the long process of bringing Little Man, Little Man back into print (which happened in 2018), I became interested in the people, places, and communities that inspired and sustained Baldwin during his life as a self-proclaimed “transatlantic commuter.” In the process, two guiding questions for me became: What stories and aspects of Baldwin’s life have remained untold? And how has this influenced the way we understand his writing and his legacy?

In a recent New Yorker article, Doreen St Félix wrote movingly about the problem with popular conceptions of Baldwin as a one-dimensional icon of the civil rights movement, and what she calls the “excision of Baldwin’s queerness, which means the excision of full love.” She also discussed how his archives, when “under vitrine, turn sterile,” so that “transformation, let alone transformative understanding, cannot occur.” By focusing on his relationships with four men he loved the most, my book puts the prevailing importance of love in Baldwin’s life and work at its very center. But the focus isn’t just on men; Baldwin’s relationships with women like Toni Morrison and Lorraine Hansberry, as well as Orilla “Bill” Miller, his young schoolteacher in Harlem from the Midwest, and Mary Painter, an American economist he met in Paris and one of his closest friends, are also woven together in the layered “love story” this book tells.

So much surprised me! It’s widely understood how important Harlem, Paris, and the south of France were to Baldwin’s development, and I knew that he spent a significant amount of time in Turkey in the 1960s—but there’s nothing quite like combing through the archives yourself to come to a new understanding of just how much Baldwin really considered Istanbul to be his home during that crucial decade. Even less understood has been the significance of shorter but still notable stays in Corsica, Switzerland, and Italy, all of which I look at closely in my book. In fact, I am the first biographer to have traveled to Corsica to spend time in the villa where Baldwin lived for six critical months in the 1950s. It was there that he seriously contemplated taking his own life after a rough break-up, but instead channeled his heartbreak into a creative breakthrough with what later became Another Country. I also made several trips to Tuscany, where he spent meaningful time with Yoran Cazac.

The biographer Lytton Strachey has written about how part of his method was to “shoot a sudden, revealing searchlight into obscure recesses hitherto undivined.” Something similar happened to me back in 2003 when I discovered that Yoran Cazac was still alive. (I had been told by one of Baldwin’s early biographers that he was almost surely deceased.) So what began as a quest to bring Little Man, Little Man back into print and write about this missing chapter from Baldwin’s life ended up growing organically into a full-length biography. I backed into it, as it were, chronologically. Which made it very clear to me that writing a biography is not a linear endeavor; rather it’s a patchwork, a re-construction, especially when it comes to recovering the lives and stories of figures marginalized because of their race or sexuality, or as in Baldwin’s case, both. It’s rare for a reader to see the author-as-biographer making these crucial discoveries, exposing the seams, as it were, in the book’s construction, and dramatizing how these revisionary stories manage to get told. It has the added benefit of breathing new and unexpected life into the book’s conclusion.

My intention is for the book to enhance the public’s understanding of just how international and multifaceted Baldwin’s life was as a Black writer, as a queer writer, and a civil rights activist, and that it will contribute to a growing body of new and innovative approaches to the genre of Black and queer biography. For example, Imani Perry’s Looking for Lorraine, about the writer and playwright Lorraine Hansberry, which she calls “less a biography than a genre yet to be named,” incorporates her own search for hidden truths into the book, and Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ biography of Audre Lorde, another contemporary of Baldwin’s, is structured less chronologically than thematically in order to capture the weaving of politics and aesthetics in her subject’s life. In my case, rather than the idea of a singular author, I focused on Baldwin’s geographical and personal networks of collaboration and exchange. I hope it brings a new awareness of how he lived his life committed to the kind of mutually transformative relationships with others that he felt had the potential to change a deeply troubled world.

I think Baldwin’s relevance and visibility are actually at an all-time high. This is not something I would have ever predicted when I first began writing about him in the mid-1990s, when he was still stuck in a pretty racist and homophobic narrative as being passé. The incredible fanfare of the centennial year may be coming to an end, but we are actually in what can only be called The Era of Baldwin. His writing will always matter because he was an essayist and artist of the highest order; but his subject matter, for better or worse, has never been more relevant, nationally and internationally. His insights into white supremacy, its connections to misogyny and homophobia, and global systems of domination, remain essential for facing the threats to our humanity in the world today. But we also should never lose sight of the fact that these searing insights and beautiful words come from Baldwin’s intensely lived life, full of risk, sacrifice, and pain, yes, but also of collaboration, community, and above all, love.