Bloomsbury Circus

The first major biography of James Baldwin in three decades, this book reveals how profoundly the writer’s personal relationships shaped his life and work. Drawing on archival material and original research and interviews, Nicholas Boggs 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.