Nicholas Boggs for Baldwin: A Love Story

'Compulsively interesting and beautifully written - there is something to treasure on every page. I absolutely loved it' - Zadie Smith

Join us for an evening with Nicholas Boggs to celebrate the first major biography of James Baldwin to have been published in three decades - Baldwin: A Love Story. This event will be chaired by novelist, professor, and translator Maureen Freely.

'For me,' wrote James Baldwin in 1959, 'the difficulty is to remain in touch with the private life. The private life, his own and that of others, is the writer's subject - his key and ours to his achievement.'

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 alchemised them into novels, essays and plays that speak truth to power and which had an indelible impact on the civil rights movement and on Black and queer literary history.

Nicholas Boggs was an undergraduate when he discovered James Baldwin's out-of-print children's book, Little Man, Little Man: A Story of Childhood, in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. After he tracked down its illustrator, the French artist Yoran Cazac, he went on to coedit an acclaimed new edition of the book in 2018. His writing has also been anthologised in The Cambridge Companion to James Baldwin, James Baldwin Now, and Speculative Light: The Arts of Beauford Delaney and James Baldwin. He received his BA in English from Yale, his MFA in creative writing from American University, and his PhD in English from Columbia. Born and raised in Washington, DC, he lives in Brooklyn, New York.