Baldwin: A Love Story

I love how this biography foregrounds James Baldwin’s life as a gay man and the loves that influenced his art and his political advocacy. This aspect of Baldwin’s life was unfortunately somewhat hidden in the more puritanical United States he grew up in. It’s why he fled to Paris and Istanbul, so that he could live more freely as a gay man. I have long admired Baldwin, not only for his art, but also for his central role in the American civil rights movement. In addition to this book, I highly recommend Raoul Peck’s documentary “I Am Not Your Negro.” — Chris, June 8, 2026

• 2025 National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize

Synopsis from online sources:

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.