Baldwin: A Love Story

By: Nicholas Boggs

Narrated by: 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.

Astonishing and thrilling

At first the performance of Baldwin’s voice (when he’s quoted within the text) is disconcerting and jarring, yet as the biography evolves it becomes a strategic choice that pays off and adds to the overall experience of Baldwin’s extraordinary life and evolution as a major international figure.

Personal history told through relationships

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

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.