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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's research is exhaustive, enabling him to meticulously re-stage Baldwin's life in something like biographic ultra-high-definition ..."
"Lucid, propulsive, compassionate and deeply researched ..."
"But this sympathy and skew toward its subject takes nothing from the pleasure of reading the book nor the insights Boggs delivers."
"He serves up a feast of gossip and speculation, which succeeds brilliantly as narrative, less so as morality tale."
"Boggs' descriptions of Baldwin and his life are beautiful and incisive ..."
"Boggs keeps up with Baldwin's political commitments, his chaotic private life, and his professional battles, meetings, hopes, defeats ..."
"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."
"Diligent but fatally overstuffed ..."
"Boggs handles all of this with a commanding, sure-footed authority and comprehensiveness, subtle and solemn at once, that dazzles and awes."
"A dynamic portrait that deepens our understanding of a complex artist ..."
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