Home › Books › Baldwin: A Love Story
Baldwin: A Love Story
by
88/99
Critics' Rating Index
91/99
Readers' Rating Index
n/a
Scholars' Citation Index
99/99
Volume of Reviews
80/99
Volume of Reader Ratings
Sign in to add to your shelf, rate, or review this book.
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
"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."
"He wants him to end not in disappointment or irrelevance but with the Legion of Honor ..."
"The sourcing is heavily weighted toward Baldwin's own papers and therefore skews toward his version of events, which leaves it open to some of Baldwin's own self-mythologizing ..."
"The author's rigorous research...makes for an impressive portrait of Baldwin's life and work."
"Boggs makes a strong case for [Baldwin's later novels] as successful formal experiments in which Baldwin once again transmuted the storms of his personal life into eloquent indictments of systemic racism ..."
"Boggs sometimes strains to detect homoeroticism in Baldwin's relations with men he was friendly with ..."
"Boggs comes about as close as anyone has to wrapping his arms around Baldwin, embracing him, if you will, in his entirety."
"Boggs shows Baldwin's impact, not only as a novelist and essayist of breathtaking power but also as a crucial voice in the Civil Rights movement ..."
"A fiery, fiercely researched biography worthy of an American genius, an indictment of enduring racism and 'homosocial panic.' Boggs teases out the aura of the divine that suffused Baldwin's oeuvre ..."
"The churn and swirl of Baldwin's life is rendered emotionally rational as Boggs expertly details how Baldwin's personal life pervades his work."
Preview
Reader Reviews
0 reviewsSign in to write a review.
No reader reviews yet. Be the first!