BALDWIN

Reenvisioning the life of a major 20th-century writer and civil rights icon.

The reputation of James Baldwin (1924-1987) waxed and waned over his lifetime—and beyond. He began as the promising young author of the novel Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953) and the essay collection Notes of a Native Son (1955) before emerging as a crucial “witness” to the civil rights struggle, electrifying readers with his book-length essay The Fire Next Time (1963). Yet his frank treatment of homosexuality in novels like Giovanni’s Room (1956) and Another Country (1962) discomfited publishers and critics, and he struck some younger Black radicals as passé. His late fiction was roundly (and unfairly) dismissed. In recent years, the advent of Black Lives Matter and a host of new critical studies have forced us to rethink Baldwin. The author of this vibrant new biography divides his “Love Story” into discrete sections named for four men in the subject’s life: painter Beauford Delaney, an early mentor and “spiritual father”; Lucien Happersberger, the Swiss man he called “the love of my life,” whose emotional support enabled him to complete Giovanni’s Room; Engin Cezzar, the Turkish actor and “blood brother” who offered refuge in Istanbul during the turbulent ’60s; and Yoran Cazac, an enigmatic French artist and collaborator on Little Man, Little Man, a 1976 picture book. (Boggs played a decisive role in the book’s 2018 reissue and interrupts the narrative to recount his efforts to locate and interview Cazac, a backstory that might have been more effective as an afterword.) Boggs establishes Baldwin as a restless writer who publicly “forced readers to confront the connections between white supremacy, masculinity, and sexuality” while privately seeking the “redemptive power of love” with other men, gay, straight, and bisexual.

A dynamic portrait that deepens our understanding of a complex artist.