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.

Go Tell it On the Mountain by James Baldwin

Hello my lovely readers! I'm really making headway on my 10 Books 10 Decades Challenge  just before the year end. I only have two more books to read and I'll have completed it. This was my first James Baldwin read and wow...what a book. Let's get into it. 

SYNOPSIS
Baldwin's classic novel opened new possibilities in the American language and in the way Americans understand themselves. With lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating symbolic power, and a rage that is at once unrelenting and compassionate, Baldwin tells the story of the stepson of the minister of a storefront Pentecostal church in Harlem one Saturday in March of 1935. Originally published in 1953, Baldwin said of his first novel, " Mountain is the book I had to write if I was ever going to write anything else."