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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 ..."
"Boggs's biography demonstrates the centrality of love to all aspects of Baldwin's life ..."
"Lucid, propulsive, compassionate and deeply researched ..."
"Even-handed and critically rigorous biography ..."
"An unrivaled homage to James Baldwin, a complex creative figure who changed American literature and thoughts about race in the 20th-century and beyond."
"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."
"But there is an awful lot of padding as well."
"Without doubt the most significant account of Baldwin's life since David Leeming's biography of the author thirty years ago, Baldwin: A Love Story is a triumphant work of scholarship and issues a robust challenge to a new generation of readers to confront the man they have claimed as their prophet."
"The focus here is on Baldwin's complex understanding of sexuality, especially homosexuality ..."
"Boggs's research is exhaustive, enabling him to meticulously re-stage Baldwin's life in something like biographic ultra-high-definition ..."
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