A TIME TOP 10 BOOK OF 2025 AN ATLANTIC TOP 10 BOOK OF 2025 A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF
2025 AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER AN AMAZON BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR FINALIST FOR THE NBCC
JOHN LEONARD PRIZE 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.
