Based on two decades of original research and exclusive access to unpublished material, a ground-breaking biography from one of the world's most prominent James Baldwin scholars that uncovers the literary icon through the great loves of his life

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'Compulsively interesting and beautifully written - there is something to treasure on every page. I absolutely loved it' Zadie Smith

'[A] gloriously written and exhaustively researched page-turner' Jacqueline Woodson
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‘For me,’ wrote James Baldwin in 1959, ‘the difficulty is to remain in touch with the private life. The private life, his own and that of others, is the writer’s subject – his key and ours to his achievement.’

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 alchemised them into novels, essays and plays that speak truth to power and which 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's biography of James Baldwin is not merely comprehensive and brilliantly researched, it is beautifully structured and nourished by insight and sympathy. It creates an extraordinary and definitive portrait of Baldwin and his time" - Colm Tóibín, author of BROOKLYN and THE MASTER

"Nicholas Boggs goes far beyond other scholars in tracing Baldwin’s relationships and their role in his work … Everybody knows Baldwin’s name – but the elusiveness remains. The writer and scholar Nicholas Boggs aims to change that in his sensational new biography, Baldwin: A Love Story, expanding on what we know of Baldwin’s gifts and suffering, his writing life and his love life … Boggs handles all of this with a commanding, sure-footed authority and comprehensiveness, subtle and solemn at once, that dazzles and awes. The churn and swirl of Baldwin’s life is rendered emotionally rational as Boggs expertly details how Baldwin’s personal life pervades his work … The kind of masterly narrative ability that can be achieved only with deep research and deep understanding of a subject. Boggs has produced a stunning book, one whose true beauty is that it allows Baldwin to reveal himself slowly, almost tenderly. The reader is immersed in the man of Baldwin, the chaos and the preternatural talent, the tragedy and the aching heart, the flesh that itches to be touched and the voice that will not be suppressed" - New York Times