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)

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

Intimate Insights

I greatly appreciate the author's obvious research and sensitivity, while at the same time discussing Baldwin as a human being. Iconic indeed, a national treasure indeed, prone to the failings any of us are capable of --- and yet I'm full of affection for him. He was an important, and very brave witness to a pivotal time in our nation's evolution. I think he would have liked this portrait of his life. I also think he'd be horrified to see how our country has undone what little progress we had made since he left us. AND BRAVO to the voice actor - it felt as if I was listening to James himself when he spoke his quotes. Wow. Thank you!

Very engaging

I throughly enjoyed reading this detailed account of the life and loves and works of James Baldwin. Extremely well researched, enhanced with snippets of letters to family and friends, I was not let down in the least. Bravo to the author and narrator. For sure, five stars all around.