Who did James Baldwin love and how did those relationships shape his work? Author and scholar Nicholas Boggs set out to answer these questions in a remarkable new biography of the late American writer. Baldwin: A Love Story centers Baldwin's queer relationships alongside his relationships with family and friends in order to better understand the creative process behind classics such as Giovanni's Room and The Fire Next Time.
The book, organized in sections centered around the writer's four great loves, details how Baldwin spent decades wrestling with his own sexuality, racism in the U.S. and abroad and the cost of fame. Through Baldwin's extensive correspondence with friends and lovers and ample research, Boggs writes intimately of Baldwin's interior life as he was drafting his many novels, essays and plays.
NPR's Michel Martin met with Boggs in Harlem, where Baldwin was born and raised. Together, they visited the site of Baldwin's elementary school, now designated as "James Baldwin Place," and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, which is home to the James Baldwin papers, a vast archive documenting Baldwin's career.
The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Interview highlights
Michel Martin: For people who aren't as familiar with James Baldwin, why was he such a towering figure?
Nicholas Boggs: James Baldwin's face is on the cover of Time magazine in 1963, OK? This is sort of the height of the civil rights movement. So he — if for no other reason — he is important because he is a titan of that movement. He was the voice of Black America. He was appearing on television all the time.
Martin: Here's James Baldwin on The Dick Cavett Show in 1969.
"The word Negro in this country is — really is designed, finally, to disguise the fact of when it's talking about another man, a man like you, who wants what you want. And insofar as the American public wants to think, there has been progress, they overlook one very simple thing. I don't want to be given anything by you. I just want you to leave me alone so I can do it myself."
Martin: He was what we call a public intellectual. I don't even know we used that term back then, but he was what we'd call a public intellectual.
Boggs: He was an absolute celebrity. I mean, he was best friends with people like Marlon Brando, Maya Angelou and Nina Simone, Lena Horne, Harry Belafonte, you name it. When it came to Black America, there had never been anything quite like that in this country.
Martin: What was his message?
Boggs: Well, his message was a message about love, and that is part of why that's the focus of this book. His message was that, as he put it in The Fire Next Time, only love will throw open the gates to liberation. And he thought that Blacks and whites had to come together like lovers, as he put it, and really excavate the past and the present, come to a kind of mutual recognition and understanding by really confronting the past, not erasing, not pretending that slavery and its legacies were somehow gone. And … the concept that he used was innocence. He said, white Americans have to not pretend that they're innocent; the innocence constitutes the crime.
Martin: He's known for his incisive, hard-hitting commentaries about race, but one of the points that you make in the book is that he talked about how race as a form of oppression doesn't live alone. It is connected to all these other forms of oppression — around sexuality, around gender. And, you know, we have words for that now. We call it intersectionality, but I don't think that too many other intellectuals were thinking in those terms, or talking in those terms at that time. How was that received?
Boggs: Well, his essays early in his career, and for most of his career, were really about race relations. However, his insights into sexuality were key. He felt menaced by his sexuality, by these categories. So he really had to think about it, and he had to think about the way that miscegenation, at the heart of enslavement in this country, was a sexualized dynamic. But he said when asked why he wrote Giovanni's Room, and he said, "If I hadn't written this novel, I don't know if I could have ever written again." This was something in himself that he had to confront, right? His own sexuality. And he said no one could blackmail him then. "You didn't tell me. I told you." That's what he said. So this is how he kind of rejected these systems of domination in terms of these identities.
Martin: We look at his body of work now. We think, "oh, my gosh, he was so productive." But he had many periods where he was really struggling. He was struggling to get published. He was struggling to get his career off the ground. He had many projects that never saw fruition. Do you think that those are all related? How do you understand that?
Boggs: Well, listen, I think Baldwin was a human being, and that's one of the things that I really tried to sort of explore and get across in this book. And in some ways, yes, he had some difficult relationships, shall we say. But what struck me as I wrote the book was actually how incredible it was that he had these relationships that sustained him for so long and came in and out. Baldwin loved his family here in Harlem, but he was living most of his life abroad. So he had to construct these alternative kinship structures. Beauford Delaney was his spiritual father, then Lucien Happersberger, his first great love in Paris. They were together on and off for years. Yeah, they had some really rocky times, but it was Lucien who came to his bedside and was there when he died. I mean, they became like family. The same with Engin Cezzar, who I also explored, his Turkish friend. Yoran Cazac as well. So while he had these frustrations, he also provides a model for a kind of expansive, sort of erotic and platonic life with other people that can move in and out of these different iterations. However, there is no denying that difficulties of racism and homophobia had a very, very negative impact on him.
Martin: What would you say is Baldwin's legacy?
Boggs: It is a legacy of love. It's a difficult love. It's a risky love. It's not this easy romantic love. He always said that love is a battle, love is a war, love is a growing up. And that's because his journey to self-love was difficult. But the journey that we're on now in America to reclaim our humanity is also going to be a battle and a war, and I don't mean that in terms of weapons, I mean that internally inside of us as Americans coming to really trying to truly see each other as human beings.
The digital version of this interview was edited by Suzanne Nuyen and produced by Majd Al-Waheidi.
Copyright 2025 NPR
