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Baldwin: A Love Story
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About This Book
Drawing on extensive new archival material, this spellbinding biography reveals how James Baldwin's relationships shaped his work. A Love Story tells the overlapping stories of James Baldwin's most sustaining 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. This biography shows for the first time how Baldwin drew on complex structures within these relationships—geographical, cultural, political, artistic, and erotic—and alchemized them into art that spoke truth to power and had an indelible impact on the Civil Rights Movement and on Black and queer literary history. Nicholas Boggs's rich and subtle narration of Baldwin's public story and his lucid discussion of his work are underpinned by what he calls "a search for the truth about Baldwin's most sustaining intimate relationships and how they had shaped his life and art, which in turn has had such an indelible impact on the literary and political landscape of the twentieth century and continues to influence and even offer some measure of hope for the world today. It would not be until close to the end of this voyage that Irealized what I had actually been researching and trying to write all along was a new James Baldwin biography. But from the very beginning, I always knew it was a love story."
Reviews
"Boggs' descriptions of Baldwin and his life are beautiful and incisive ..."
"A dynamic portrait that deepens our understanding of a complex artist ..."
"The author's rigorous research...makes for an impressive portrait of Baldwin's life and work."
"Based on extensive interviews with many Baldwin associates and family members, this is an emotionally rich and complex look at a writer who exemplifies the impossibility of separating the personal from the political."
"Boggs's research is exhaustive, enabling him to meticulously re-stage Baldwin's life in something like biographic ultra-high-definition ..."
"As we move deeper into the twenty-first century, James Baldwin is unavoidable in ways that mid- to late-twentieth-century literary contemporaries such as Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer are, simply put, not."
"Boggs's biography demonstrates the centrality of love to all aspects of Baldwin's life ..."
"Boggs offers fresh insights throughout his final section ..."
"Lucid, propulsive, compassionate and deeply researched ..."
"You are never left in any doubt about Baldwin's fierce devotion to his craft ..."
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