Baldwin: A Love Story

WINNER OF THE NBCC JOHN LEONARD PRIZE
WINNER OF THE PEN/ JACQUELINE BOGRAD WELD AWARD FOR BIOGRAPHY
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
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.

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.