Baldwin: A Love Story

De: Nicholas Boggs

Narrado por: Ron Butler

"Ron Butler's narration is a master class in maintaining the listener's attention over the course of a lengthy audiobook. He makes every change in tone, volume, and pace with careful purpose, creating a seamless listening experience." — AudioFile (Earphones Award Winner)

“[Ron] Butler’s narration is a master class in maintaining the listener’s attention over the course of a lengthy audiobook. He makes every change in tone, volume, and pace with careful purpose, creating a seamless listening experience.” — LitHub

Drawing on new archival material, original research, and interviews, this spellbinding book is the first major biography of James Baldwin in three decades, revealing how profoundly his personal relationships shaped his life and work.

Baldwin: A Love Story, the first major biography of James Baldwin in three decades, reveals how profoundly the writer’s personal relationships shaped his life and work. Drawing on newly uncovered archival material and original research and interviews, this spellbinding book tells the overlapping stories of Baldwin’s most sustaining intimate and artistic relationships: 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, whose long-overlooked significance as Baldwin’s last great love is explored in these pages for the first time.

Nicholas Boggs shows how Baldwin drew on all the complex forces within these relationships—geographical, cultural, political, artistic, and erotic— and alchemized them into novels, essays, and plays that speak truth to power and had an indelible impact on the civil rights movement and on Black and queer literary history. Richly immersive, Baldwin: A Love Story follows the writer’s creative journey between Harlem, Paris, Switzerland, the southern United States, Istanbul, Africa, the South of France, and beyond. In so doing, it magnifies our understanding of the public and private lives of one of the major literary figures of the twentieth century, whose contributions only continue to grow in influence.

A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Baldwin is a gift

If you’re a fan of James Baldwin and want a deeper insight into his life and his loves, this is a phenomenal biography.

Quintessential Baldwin Biography

Similar to Jonathan Eig's MLK biography this book will serve as a historical document that outlines Baldwin's not only his literary strength but how his life and his loves made that strength possible. Excellent read.

wow such an epiphany

amazing narrator with Ron Butler performing this wonderful prose by Nicholas Boggs. I learned so much and will be returning to this book again and again!

Stunning and compelling

I couldn’t stop listening. The reader’s ability to channel Baldwin’s voice is uncanny. The author seamlessly intertwines Baldwin’s life with his writing and his powerful evolution into a philosopher and activist around issues of race and sexuality. I had seen clips and films of Baldwin and read pieces of his writing, but this extraordinary biography, written through the lens of love, gives such a full sense of the man as one of the most important in the 20th c.

Personal history told through relationships

Highly personal journey and detailed portrayal of a vivid historic life of a great social artist.