Baldwin: A Love Story

by Nicholas Boggs, Ron Butler (Narrator)

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."

16 hr.

Genres: Biography, Nonfiction, History, LGBT, Biography Memoir, Audiobook, Queer

16 pages, Audiobook

Published August 19, 2025

Reviews

[Flo · Rating 5 out of 5]

For an author like James Baldwin, whose books were so deeply inspired by his life, a biography like this is everything his fans could wish for. To see all the connections and all the possible explanations for his characters' decisions was beautiful. For people who haven’t read his books, this also shows his influence in the Civil Rights Movement. Highly recommended.

[Sarah Schulman · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very personal, up close approach to Baldwin filled with information and the dismantling of many myths. Boggs is able show the dynamics between complex forces. How racism and religion produce an escape and a catharsis and an oppressive theater all at once. How the desire for love from transactional and somewhat madcap younger men repeated and repeated as Baldwin -in a sense -recreated the sadness. And most interestingly to me how easily other people gave him money, exotic places to stay, trips, and endless connections. His one arena of almost no struggle was the one for artistic support- financial and incredible access to institutions and gatekeepers. He was always broke but it seems more because of drinking and not working jobs, but not because of lack of contributors. And he resented when loans were asked to be repaid. Despite great pain from structural and parental dysfunction the world wanted him to be a writer. And that stands out in this very intimate and fascinating work.

[Roman Clodia · Rating 4 out of 5]

... to be an artist to him, was to be a truth-teller about everything - race, sex, politics, love - and it was also to be, in a word he would use with increasing frequency in the years to come, a witness.

And, as this sensitive and exhaustive biography shows, Baldwin had a lot to witness in his lifetime. I came to this not knowing much about Baldwin's life and only fairly recently having discovered his writing which stuns me with its beauty and pain. So this book was perhaps not the best place to start with the life as the text is over 700 pages which gives an idea of the level of detail at which it operates.

Boggs does an immense job in pulling together a complex life - and man. From the early upbringing in Harlem which led to Jimmy being a child-preacher, to the complicated family and struggles with acknowledging his sexuality from a young age, this draws us into Baldwin's life with verve. The swerve away from religion and the desire to write is made comprehensible, alongside the luck that Baldwin had in being spotted and helped by a series of teachers, mentors and patrons.

The highlights for me are the way Boggs explores how Baldwin's life, experiences and friends are transmuted into his fiction, certainly not in any simplistic autobiographical way. The genesis of Another Country is especially extended, with Baldwin playing around with ideas and material for years before it finally clicks into the work we have.

The other quality that makes this book come to life is the careful tracing of the Civil Rights era and Baldwin's positioning as a spokesperson for the movement. He was operating at the highest levels in speaking to Bobby Kennedy - even while the FBI were compiling a thick dossier on him as 'a dangerous individual who could be expected to commit acts inimical to the national defense and public safety of the United States in a time of emergency'. Baldwin's fear in travelling to the South where the possibility of being lynched was very real is palpable and there are a number of times when he is beaten and abused for both his skin colour and his overt sexuality.

The line-up of Baldwin's friends is incredible from a young Marlon Brando in the Village (and the possibility of them being lovers is floated here), to prominent Black Panthers, writers, artists, musicians and icons like Martin Luther King and Malcolm X.

Ironically, the careful delineation of Baldwin's love affairs ended up being the least interesting part of the book, in the end, for this reader, though this sense of love and connection was, arguably, one of the most important qualities in Baldwin's life and art. His coming to an understanding of how race has been pathologized in the US led to his ability to pierce beyond the carapace of humanity to bring back such searing insights as we find in his short story 'Going To Meet The Man' where a white supremacist finds the only way he can have sex is while recalling seeing a Black man lynched and set on fire when he was a child.

Baldwin's ability to move beyond the personal and to see issues around race and sexuality as urgently political informs his essays, and there are some overlaps in the way that he sees the interlinking in America's mythology of race, colour and sexuality, especially in defining 'masculinity'. I was reminded, at times, of Frantz Fanon and his psychological unpicking of what torture, abuse and violence does to the soul and psyche of the perpetrator, as well as the victim.

In short, this is a detailed, thoughtful and sensitive biography that is not hagiographical but which is clearly immensely sympathetic to Baldwin. There are times when I felt that Boggs relies a little too much on very long extracts from the fiction and essays - almost as if he reveres Baldwin's words so much, he can't bear to cut them - and that adds to the length of this book.

Nevertheless, this is an immense achievement, bringing the private Jimmy Baldwin and the public James Baldwin to us as a multidimensional writer, thinker, friend, lover, son, brother and public intellectual. The final chapter of Baldwin's last days, reduced by cancer and in pain, is immensely moving - and the presence of a past lover as well as his brother who were with him at the end, tells us something about how this man was loved: 'As David said, "It's alright, Jimmy, you can cross over now."

[Richard Propes · Rating 5 out of 5]

In a world often filled with quick reads and subsequent reviews, it was a rather glorious experience to immerse myself in the 700+ page "Baldwin: A Love Story" by Nicholas Boggs.

Noted as the first major biography of James Baldwin in three decades, "Baldwin: A Love Story" reveals just how profoundly Baldwin's personal relationships impacted his life and his literary work.

Boggs taps into a wealth of new archival material, original research, interviews, and his own remarkable narration to paint an immersive story that you never want to leave. For those who know Baldwin's life, such names as Beauford Delaney, Lucien Happersberger, Engin Cezzar, and Yoran Cazac will be familiar yet still likely somewhat mysterious. Somehow, Boggs brings them all wondrously to life in a way that feels remarkably true to the essence of the Baldwin we've long known and the Baldwin we've perhaps never known.

While "Baldwin: A Love Story" is a remarkable effort as a biography, it's perhaps even more remarkable for Boggs's ability to capture this masterful writer's writing process and how it was shaped and developed and nurtured by his relationships whether they be lovers, intimate friends, muses, or mentors.

"Baldwin: A Love Story" unfolds leisurely, lyrically really, and with the rhythms of creative life fully lived in all its complexities. Boggs possesses a subtle narrative voice that illustrates how Baldwin was shaped by the structures within relationships - cultural forces, political movements, artistry, geography and, of course, the erotic. This is an uncompromisingly intimate story that invites us to observe and be shaped by that intimacy in profound ways. While reading, I often felt as if I could see Baldwin in front of me as his many masterpieces unfolded like "Giovanni's Room," "The Fire Next Time," "If Beale Street Could Talk," "Go Tell It on the Mountain" and so many others. This feels like a sublime companion to the riveting documentary "I Am Not Your Negro," and it's a book I've been unable to stop thinking about since I wound down my time with it after two weeks of slow, intentional, and immersive reading.

Indeed, "Baldwin: A Love Story" isn't a quick read. Beyond its over 700-page length, Boggs offers up so many layers of Baldwin you're scared to rush through it for fear of missing an essential fact or story. For Baldwin fans, "Baldwin: A Love Story" is a must-read. For those wanting an in-depth yet lyrical trip through a master writer's creative journey, this is a book to not be missed.

[jocelyn • coolgalreading · Rating 5 out of 5]

absolutely phenomenal. james 🫶🏻

[Paloma · Rating 5 out of 5]

James Baldwin was a world of his own, and we were lucky to have had him.

Loved the way the author wrote about Baldwin, he not only told me his story, he made me feel. I mostly felt sadness for Baldwin but was happy for his triumphs. Baldwin always sought out love, in teachers, in friends, in lovers even though they all mostly ended and left him broken more and more each time. This book is a love story to Baldwin and about him. Everything from his works to his friends to his life mostly revolved around being accepted and loved, and his work mostly reflected that. I truly enjoyed this biography and highly suggest it because of all the beautiful things that the author wrote about Baldwin, and this book is an ode to him.

Thank you, Netgalley and Farrar, Straus, and Giroux for this masterpiece. All opinions are entirely my own.

[Theo Logos · Rating 3 out of 5]

Nicholas Boggs’ Baldwin: A Love Story is a fine, serviceable biography of the great James Baldwin. At over seven hundred pages, it is comprehensive in its coverage of this complex and multi-talented man, exhaustively chronicling Baldwin’s complicated life and the intimately entangled relationship it had with his often autobiographical works. Baldwin’s passionate advocacy for Civil Rights, his groundbreaking writing on homosexuality, his brilliance as an unsurpassed essayist — all of it is here. Boggs highlights Baldwin’s many significant love relationships, but that feels more like an accent than a theme.

My issue with this book is that if you are only going to read one Baldwin biography this isn’t the one you should read, and it is too long and adds too little if you have already read another Baldwin bio. James Baldwin: A Biography by Baldwin’s longtime, intimate friend David Leeming is the biography you should read first. Baldwin hand picked him to write his biography and gave him full access to his papers. And after you have read it, this book simply doesn’t add enough to justify reading another lengthy, comprehensive biography. It’s not a bad book, I just don’t see that it was necessary.

[Sebastian · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is definitely a highlight among the biographies published this year. Seeing James's life through the prism of his four main love interests is such a fascinating take on his life and work. I enjoyed getting to know the author on a more intimate level, and I remain in awe of his contribution to political change in the US—especially regarding racial discrimination—and his determination to be his true self no matter what. His life is vividly depicted by focusing on those closest to his heart and the people who heavily influenced his writing. I certainly need to delve into more of James’s novels, and the background painted in this book is the perfect place to start.

[Derek Driggs · Rating 5 out of 5]

I now understand what reviewers mean when they call a book “a triumph.” The author’s efforts to understand Baldwin’s life through the men he loved, through the family he loved, through the art form he loved, and through the countries he loved were an absolute win for humanity.

James Baldwin is a special hero of mine. Reading a book that celebrates his incredible impact—such huge waves of goodness emanating still from such a small, often sickly, and always haunted soul born to poverty and oppression in 1920s Harlem—was nothing short of inspiring and invigorating. And the fact that the author takes no effort to hide Baldwin’s own human weaknesses doesn’t take away from the legend he is; it only shows us that even a human can live a legendary life.

By far and away one of the best books of the year, for this James Baldwin devotee.

[Cherisa B · Rating 3 out of 5]

The iconoclast and his work from the perspective that most all he did and wrote he did looking for love and acceptance from a person (man) who could be his intellectual or artistic equal and create domestic tranquility for his own creativity. He never found such a mate or situation that could last for very long. Interesting but not really convincing. The theory seems a little far fetched, but Hoggs lays out his case pretty thoroughly and we get to go through reviews and critiques of a lot of Baldwin's greatest work.

[Morgan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Coming in at 700 pages, I happily dropped all the books I was reading to be immersed in Baldwin: A Love Story and it was a joy to read. Broken into four sections, Boggs shows us the people, events, and places that shaped and nurtured Baldwin's writing. Boggs' narrative voice and the way he laid out the book worked incredibly well together. I learned so much about James Baldwin and I highly recommend picking up a copy.

[James Norman]

First of all, it blows my mind to think about the work that Nicholas Boggs put into this book . . . but I am so glad that he did. Insights into a great man who was very much like you and me. Baldwin had a vision of our country and of love that inspires me. This is a very important book. The world is better because of both James Baldwin and Nicholas Boggs.

[Will · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5, rounded up

[Strega Di Gatti · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nicholas Boggs got so lost in the sauce. But ultimately, I gotta give that a pass, because we all end up benefiting from the amount of work and research in Baldwin: A Love Story. In this doorstopper, Boggs is trying to illuminate James Baldwin's life through his romantic relationships with four of his "greatest loves". What he’s actually done is give us an exhaustive timeline of James Baldwin's career and personal life, an avalanche of tiny fully researched details, that threatens to (but doesn't quite) bury his overarching narrative. 

Boggs is able to beautifully capture how Baldwin feels, but not how these individuals feel, and worse, often leaves their personalities a mystery. I felt frustrated as a reader. Sadly in Beauford Delaney's portrayal, he's seen as a case for pity. And the amount that I ended up caring about Lucien Happersberger or Engin Cezzar was pretty minimal. The book's thesis is that these individuals were (among the dozens of Baldwin lovers) most worthy of examination. Well, if these often slippery and inscrutable folks weaving in and out of the chronological timeline of this book is the price we pay for a work this exhaustive, I'm fine with it. 

I mentioned the incredible amount of work in this book, it represents over 20 years worth of research beginning when Boggs was a grad student. An outstanding commitment to understanding his subject, but I can see how quickly a writer can lose the forest for the trees. Boggs quotes extensively from Baldwin's letters, so much so I looked up where they were archived and was surprised to see that nobody has published a collection of his correspondence yet! Somebody pick up this thread, please.

Because Baldwin really comes to life in his own words, and this book leans on them so much, I found this work raised a lot of questions about the unseen people he corresponds with. Baldwin's relationships with women are reduced to caretakers and his admiration of "divas". He's frequently literally living with his lovers' wives, but they're essentially shadows. Baldwin's long-time best friend Mary Painter, the recipient of so many of his thoughts about his work and relationships, deserved illumination of her own. Maya Angelou, who we know considered Jimmy to be a "brother", is referenced only in passing in her early career as a dancer/actor. The most that's said about Toni Morrison is that she gave him a pass for Tish's female voice in If Beale Street Could Talk.

I was very impressed with the final section about Yoran Cazac, the illustrator of Baldwin's Little Man, Little Man. Boggs tracked down Cazac and his family in 2002 for a series of interviews about James Baldwin and the creation of this children's book. This entire section was new and interesting information, and Bogg's dedication led to a reprinting of Little Man, Little Man in 2018. 

Boggs explains he wanted to write Baldwin: A Love Story because Baldwin's biographers typically don't explore his sexuality and he was sick of "reading between the lines". I can understand why Boggs set out to focus on these areas, especially as he is a queer scholar. This area of study was long overdue, especially for such an important author.

While I don't believe Bogg wrote a definitive biography, he did give us an excellent encyclopedia of events, places, dinners, and travel timelines. No detail is missed! Literary historians of this time period will benefit from being able to easily look up the transatlantic flights, apartment locations, meals eaten, toilets broken, cheques cashed, and cafes sat in for Baldwin and his famous contemporaries. Baldwin: A Love Story is well worth buying and reading even if you have other biographies on your shelf. 

[Michael B. · Rating 5 out of 5]

In my youth I often worked in bookstores. I have a distinct memory of mixed feelings when one of these stores I worked in created a separate shelf for “gay fiction” which evidently had to be segregated from “regular” fiction lest some unsuspecting fan of literature accidentally encounter a gay character and be offended. It is a measure of how far we have come that these sections have since been dissolved and literature featuring all kinds of different characters now are able to sit comfortably together on the same shelf, integrated for all eternity. At the same time my (nominally “progressive”) bookstore created the special shelf, we were at the same time preparing to dismantle the section formerly created for “African-American Literature”. The head scratcher for staff was “where do we now shelve James Baldwin?”

James, I am sure, would have chuckled at that dilemma for the question of labels was something he had to struggle with all his life. He was not only a writer but often he earned the distinction of being a black writer, as if this were a species all its own. Early in his career he published Giovanni’s Room and this distinguished him again as a writer of special merits, one that piled on more unhelpful labels. Is it difficult to appreciate why Baldwin might spend the bulk of his life battling labels? Labels are what White culture used to divide people. From Baldwin’s perspective, and to paraphrase Maya Angelou, we have more things in common than make us distinct.

Emphasizing difference is not a useful tool for the artist, and James Baldwin was an artist, no matter how others might have sought to sideline him as an “other”. He railed against the power of the White community to label everything and ensure all was in its appropriate box. No wonder he often found himself attracted to fellow “outsiders”, folks who naturally sought to resist the confines of the box, those who sought freedom from the cultural straitjackets. But in this he was way ahead of his time.

There is a fascinating video available on YouTube featuring a very young Nikki Giovanni interviewing an older James Baldwin in a studio in London (1972). They sit across from one another chain smoking cigarettes. On the table in front of them sit some glasses and a flask of amber liquid. They are animated in their discussion of what it means to be an artist, a writer no less, when such terms have been constructed by White society to intentionally exclude them, much as in previous decades when it was actually illegal to teach a Negro to read or write. They speak as only two writers could of the necessity to define yourself in your own terms and not the terms others might use to pigeonhole you. They speak of the necessity of writing from one's own experience no matter that many people might not have any entry into understanding those experiences. The point is some will understand, and the writing is intended for them, to shift their perspective and create a place of belonging. We no longer need be invisible. We all have a right to exist. Through our art we help create that space.

This is not to suggest that Baldwin had an easy time existing. He grew up in a household with a stepfather who verbally abused him. This biography documents possibly five times when Baldwin attempted to take his own life. He exiles himself from a church who he fears will never accept him for who he is. He further exiles himself to Paris because, that where writers go, and because to stay in the US was to live in constant terror of being lynched or queer bashed (Baldwin was early to recognize that from the rape of slaves to the castration of those lynched, US style racisim had a peculiarly sexual overtone that placed his body at double risk).

At the same time both family and the church are also recognized as institutional centers of resiliency in the Black community and Baldwin never turns his back completely on either (while he may never return to church services again he wrote about Black churches with some sensitivity and often listened to gospel music). When his stepfather passes, Baldwin, being the eldest in a family with many siblings, assumes financial responsibility for the survival of his family. Mind you, early on Baldwin had a difficult time just taking care of himself (he is described as often having to borrow money from friends to pay his hotel bills and rarely being able to repay what was borrowed). When Baldwin finally comes into some fame he not only purchases an apartment for his mother and siblings, he is also tasked to fund his chosen family of artists and friends and the occasional lover because the creation of his art depended on equal measures of both solitude and community.

This particular biography takes as its focus the “loves” of Baldwin’s life, especially in relation to his output as an artist. Baldwin might deserve this kind of attention because this is what he so frequently wrote about - how we find connection despite our differences and how we might create art that celebrates us joining together in a community of people who understand that to love is a necessity, even as it often brings us pain. As it turns out, this is a productive through line or lens with which to make exquisite and joyful sense of Balwins life and work.

As I began reading this book last year I am tempted to suggest that this was likely my favorite read of 2025. It might even be my favorite of the new year, though it is too early to say. I will say this, reading this book has made me want to go back and re-read, with new eyes, some of the work I have already read. I am even more eager to begin exploring those that I haven't read. As I mostly buy cheaper used copies I am pained to discover that all his works remain in print and used copies are difficult to come by. If I could afford it I would buy them all new. I am excited to see if they hold up as well as that interview by a young Nikki Giovanni from 1972.

[Sam Cheng · Rating 4 out of 5]

A riveting biography of the great Jimmy Baldwin, “a major American literary figure in the 20th century.” I’m not a Baldwin scholar nor have I read a biography of Baldwin before, so I can’t comment on the historicity of Boggs’s work as such. However, I gladly report Boggs brings Baldwin to life in this tome. Constantly intriguing and thought-provoking in the way Baldwin forges new paths forward, I enjoyed learning about the various types of Baldwin’s works (e.g., novels, debut on Broadway, essays, the Malcolm X movie with Columbia Pictures, and plays in Istanbul) and his life during the creation of those projects.

Boggs weaves the works into the contours and overarching story of Baldwin’s life, highlighting how his private and public lives intersect. For example, subject matter in his writing includes African and Black American identity; racial prejudices, white supremacy, and civil rights activism; and homosexuality, queerness, and gender identity. Boggs points out Baldwin’s partners and lovers (e.g., Lucien, Yoran, Engin, and Beauford), his difficult relationship with America, resulting in his transatlantic life as he resides in places like Paris, Istanbul, and Puerto Rico when abroad. Baldwin’s growth or boldness in embracing his role in activism over the years gives readers context for his decisions to bring out specific themes in his books, plays, and scripts.

Baldwin’s enduring legacy is this: having no literary predecessors for same-sex Black love, particularly dedicated to the experiences of Black men, his intersectional work that focuses on oppression and liberation functions in this role for others who come after him. Baldwin’s bold imagination that represents Black same-sex love as such shows readers how to integrate his life “into Black American family life—or into any facet of American life.”

My thanks to Farrar, Straus and Giroux and NetGalley for an ARC.

[Bookish.Rwi · Rating 4 out of 5]

ARC Book Review.

Book ; Baldwin A love Story
Author; Nicholas Boggs
Genre ; Biography
Pub date : 19th August 2025
Rating : ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Author Nicholas Boggs introduces a different way of looking at James Baldwin’s life, his personal relationships and their impact on his work.

For a person that has had Baldwin’s books in my wishlist and TBR for a while, I’m glad I read this. It made me look forward to knowing more about him in his own POVs.

This Biography will broaden our understanding of one of the major literary figures of the twentieth century.

It took me long to finish but it was worth it.

Thanks to @netgalley and @fsgbooks for the ARC.

#bookstagram #booksbooksbooks #bookreview #arcreview #arcreviewer #BaldwinAlovestory

[Chloe McEwen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Boggs wrote an epic account of the life and loves of James Baldwin, but I can’t stop thinking about a few paragraphs from the epilogue where Boggs references an article written by Harmony Holiday that captures how I felt during most of the book. Both writers point to the sanitization of Baldwin that’s occurred as he’s come to be recognized as an activist and literary great. In holding him [or anyone] up as a hero, we’ve lost sight of the human parts of Baldwin.

His life was characterized by experiences more nuanced than any straight path to success. He was hurt by and hurt others. He loved and lost fiercely. He looked at the world he was living in and felt angry and hopeless and scared. To read the chronicle of someone so revered and to walk away feeling like I was given permission to live a complex life felt like a reason to recommend this book highly. “Let the myth of the jovial cultural servant die at last, that he may live.”

This book was my pièce de résistance. It’s not only the final and longest book I’ve read this year but also the longest non-fiction work [possibly the only biography] I’ve ever read. None of this has to do with the review; it’s really just a public brag about a personal triumph.

[Fakisha Fabre · Rating 5 out of 5]

Expertly researched and deeply humane, this biography brings Baldwin into full, vivid dimension. Boggs gives us Baldwin in full dimension - his brilliance, his vulnerability, his contradictions - rendered with such care that you feel like you’re learning how to love and live more honestly through him. A stunning, essential biography.

[Christine · Rating 5 out of 5]

All that hype? Yeah, it's true. I didn't even mind when Boggs went a little fanboying in one section (really late in the book). He earned the right to do that.

[Iza Cupial · Rating 5 out of 5]

2025 belongs to Mark Twain and James Baldwin. 6/6 ⭐️

[Edie · Rating 4 out of 5]

James Baldwin was an intense man who lived in intense times and Nicholas Boggs doesn't want the reader to miss a moment of it. It took me over a month to read this 700+ page book because I needed to take breaks from the intensity. In many ways, Baldwin: A Love Story reads as a love story to, not about, Baldwin. Ron Butler's narration was a perfect complement to author Nicholas Boggs' words. Together they weave a complicated story about a complicated man. Is the book too long? I can't figure out what I would cut but do wish Boggs would do less telling and more analysis. All of these things happened, yes. But what does it mean? To Baldwin? To culture? To society? To me, the reader? Baldwin is such a touchstone in the world of letters and politics and general discourse, I suggest anyone in the least bit interested read this book. I am glad I did. Thank you to the Boggs, Butler, Macmillan Audio, and NetGalley for the audioARC.

If you know me IRL, I've already told you all about this one. It became my whole personality for a month.

[Denise · Rating 1 out of 5]

After a third of the way in, I have to be honest with myself about this book. It is simply boring. I admire James Baldwin's writing and his activism and want to know about the man behind it, but this far into the book and we have not progressed. The author has yet to let Baldwin finish writing a book! Nicholas Boggs' writing is dull and at this point I'm ready to read some of the other biographies written about James Baldwin.

[Rachel Vardeman · Rating 5 out of 5]

First and foremost, this book is an impressive and immense literary achievement. It is so thoroughly researched, to the point that Boggs, who never met Baldwin, manages to translate that reseach into such clear and thoughtful writing about his subject, taking up the position of an intimately knowing friend. Rather than biographer to subject. As one of my dear friends often says, "to be known is to be loved" and while this book is above love, it was also written with love.

And at first, I was skeptical about this premise of love, as I had grown to know Baldwin in a very different way - as an intellectual on race, the idea of America, and as a queer artist. But after reading this absolute tome (although it's truly never a slog), I don't think there's any better way to talk about our friend Jimmy. He was the most human of humans - loving, suffering, caring, a haunted empath, and a precious small guy who I think slept a total of 12 hours in his life and maybe ate 6 whole meals. He had a very simplistic openness to the world, to people, to the ideas of race, and even his struggle with this country. I say "simplistic" in the best way possible because he had such a realistic, blunt, and unpretentious way of talking about race and gender while still acknowledging (and feeling) the very real biases people held about these truly imaginary ideas and ensuing social contructs. And I think all of these ideas, beliefs, feelings, came from his own interactions with and understanding of love. The good and the bad.

Boggs also sold me on the value of Baldwin's fiction, which I have seriously struggled with and honestly disliked. Specifically, and I know, I'm making enemies here, Giovanni's Room and Another Country. I also tend to generally struggle with writers who I think should be essayists and who, instead, write both fiction and non-fiction. But this book provided more context for his fiction writing, especially the things he was wrestling with. And served as a reminder that to struggle with something, writing in particular, can mean that the writing is powerful and influential. And specifically with Jimmy's writing, there is likely something I need to hear and learn when I'm feeling that resistance. For that, Jimmy was and continues to be one of the most influential writers of our and all time.

I could go on, because there's a lot to cover here, but I'll let Jimmy say the rest, which beautifully sums up this book:
"Society is never known, but the war of an artist with his society is a lover's war, and he does, at his best, what lovers do, which is to reveal the beloved to himself and, with that revelation, to make freedom real."

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

At over 700 pages, Baldwin: A Love Story is no quick read, but it’s an incredibly rewarding one. Nicholas Boggs delivers the first major Baldwin biography in decades, and it’s both deeply researched and beautifully intimate. What makes this book stand out is the way it shows Baldwin through his relationships (friends, lovers, mentors) people who shaped not just his personal life but his writing. Familiar names like Beauford Delaney and Lucien Happersberger come alive here in ways that feel both new and true.

Boggs also gives us rare insight into Baldwin’s creative process, showing how works like Giovanni’s Room and The Fire Next Time were forged through connection and community. The narrative is lyrical, unhurried, and immersive. You can almost feel Baldwin in the room with you.

This isn’t a biography to rush through. It’s one to savor slowly, layer by layer. For Baldwin admirers, it’s essential reading. For newcomers, it’s a powerful introduction to a life and body of work that remain as urgent as ever.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for an early copy in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.

[Daniel Sevitt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent. I loved everything about this in-depth biography which combined just the right about of detail from Baldwin's life with critical analysis of his work and the effort required to produce it. If I had a quibble it would be that I don't really buy the book's subtitle or the structure of the book in four parts. Each of the major romantic figures afforded a separate "part" of the book seems to have overlapped with the others chronologically. These were not discrete stages in Baldwin's life. I don't think it matters terribly much except in point out that three of the four romantic partners were mostly unavailable to him and certainly to the degree that he wanted.

Despite this, we are invited into a remarkable world where James Baldwin's talent and consistent struggle to understand himself were always at the forefront of his writing. If everything that an artist produces is a projection of their own identity and perspective, with Baldwin we get a more unusual identity and a profoundly complex and evolving perspective. A first class biography of an extraordinary writer.

[Jane Fudger · Rating 5 out of 5]

A well written and extremely well researched biography.I have read some of James Baldwin's novels and the occasional essay but I knew little about the author and this book was certainly an eye opener
Nicholas Boggs relates this biography through four of his beloved men who came to be the centre of not only of his writing but also his health problems and suicide attempts as relationships failed.
In someways Baldwin appeared to be child like and petulant especially when things did not go his way but throughout the stages of his life, including his fame, he gave the impression of loneliness and diconnection
A superb biography and despite its length an addictive page turner.

[Lauren King]

read a review of this book that described the way his love matured as he aged, growing calmer and steadier, like a river when it widens.

the last words baldwin wrote, scrawled on a piece of mail:

safety and honor both adore each other but are doomed to discover that they cannot find a way to live, or sleep, together. honor’s demands are brutal and so are those of safety. one or the other must give way. one or the other must surrender.

[Tasha · Rating 5 out of 5]

This took me over a month to read due to its tome-ness but I loved it. A fascinating, troubling, astonishing, well-written biography of one of the greatest minds in literature.

[Jordan Werner · Rating 4 out of 5]

very dense very good