Baldwin: A Love Story cover art

Baldwin: A Love Story

 Preview

Get 30 days of Standard free

£5.99/mo after trial. Cancel monthly.
Try for £0.00
More purchase options

Baldwin: A Love Story

By: Nicholas Boggs
Narrated by: Ron Butler
Try for £0.00

£5.99 a month after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Buy Now for £23.26

Buy Now for £23.26

Summary

 Bloomsbury presents Baldwin: A Love Story by Nicholas Boggs, read by Ron Butler

‘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.©2026 Nicholas Boggs (P)2026 Bloomsbury Publishing Plc Art & Literature Authors Biographies & Memoirs Love, Dating & Attraction Relationships Romance Celebrity

Critic reviews

Compulsively interesting and beautifully written, there is something to treasure on every page. I absolutely loved it (Zadie Smith)
All stars
Most relevant
James Baldwin has had a profound impact on me, not just as a writer, but also as someone deeply engaged with the Civil Rights movement and issues of racism. Above all, He was a deeply caring man who lived life fully, leaving a lasting impression that continues to influence me to this day. This biography does justice to his remarkable life, capturing his passion, humanity, and enduring legacy.

A Literary Treasure

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.