DOUBLE REVIEW Baldwin: A Love Story by Nicholas Boggs AND James Baldwin by David Leeming Lewis

Hello my lovely readers! I recently read these two biographies, pretty much back to back. Let's get into it!

SYNOPSIS

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.

In James Baldwin: A Biography, David Leeming, Baldwin's friend for 25 years, accessed all of Baldwin's private papers to bring readers closer than ever to the complex man who struggled out of Harlem to become a legend of American literature.

MY THOUGHTS
Both of these biographies were mind-blowingly wonderful.

I was a bit hesitant at first to read Baldwin because it took an abstract way (in my opinion) of telling his life story, but it was amazing well-done.

I will say, though, that I was much more a fan of James Baldwin by Leeming because you could feel the personal connection Leeming and Baldwin shared. I felt like I was in the room with Baldwin as he died, due to how descriptive Leeming was in his writing, as only someone who actually was in the room with Baldwin could write it. 

I'll always recommend Leeming's biography first, only because it was my favorite, but Bogg's biography is equally as good. James Baldwin. What a witness.