Drawing on new archival material, original research, and interviews, this book is the first major biography of James Baldwin in three decades, revealing how his personal relationships shaped his life and work.
Sensational ... It delivers ... Touching ... Boggs handles all of this with a commanding, sure-footed authority and comprehensiveness, subtle and solemn at once, that dazzles and awes. The churn and swirl of Baldwin’s life is rendered emotionally rational as Boggs expertly details how Baldwin’s personal life pervades his work.
Lively and vigorously researched ... Boggs makes a strong case for [Baldwin's later novels] as successful formal experiments in which Baldwin once again transmuted the storms of his personal life into eloquent indictments of systemic racism ... Even-handed and critically rigorous biography ... Boggs has dug much deeper than his predecessors ... Superlative, and it should become the new gold standard for Baldwin studies.
Though it is principally concerned with Baldwin’s personal life, [Baldwin] is good at showing how the life seeps into the fiction; political events receive less attention ... Boggs’s biography makes a hugely important contribution, because it takes us to the heart of Baldwin’s message—the fear of love—and shows how urgent that problem was for him ... Boggs sometimes strains to detect homoeroticism in Baldwin’s relations with men he was friendly with ... On the whole, though, he sticks to the facts and avoids sensationalism.
