Hello and welcome to the book review podcast. I'm M.J. Franklin. I'm an editor here at the New York Times

Book Review, and this week on the podcast, we're talking to Nicholas Boggs about his new book, Baldwin, A Love Story.

This book is many things at once. It's a comprehensive biography of Baldwin, the person, the writer, the icon.

It's a really enjoyable excavation of Baldwin's work,

filled with plenty of close reading of his books and prose.

And most pressingly, it's an argument for a new critical framework to understand Baldwin,

and that framework is love. The biography is structured

around Baldwin's relationship with a series of men that, as Boggs outlines, shaped Baldwin's life

in writing. And just personally, it's a book that completely captured me. I thought this biography

was lively, inspired, persuasive, informative. It's one of my favorites

from the year so far, which is why I'm excited to talk with Nicholas about it today. Nicholas, welcome.

So happy to be here. Thank you for joining us, and I'm so excited to dive into this book. But before

we do that, I want to start with a broad, embarrassingly simple question, which is, who is James Baldwin? And that may seem like a silly starting point, but I want to start with a broad, embarrassingly simple question, which is, who is James Baldwin?

And that may seem like a silly starting point, but I wanted to start there because I think a lot of different people have a lot of different ideas about who James Baldwin even is for a few reasons.

First, just as an artist, he was so multifaceted. He worked in many different modes, fiction, nonfiction, theater, film. Some people know him as a novelist, who wrote essays. Other know him as an essayist, an orator who wrote novels. Some people think of him as a political figure. So I wanted to set the table and define on your terms, who is James Baldwin.

First of all, he was a human being. And I think that's something that sometimes gets lost, right,

in the lionization of him, or the malignment of him over the years. There's this image of him,

which is an important one, as a kind of icon of the civil rights movement. We see these in

clips and memes and things like that, but what we often lose is that where was this voice coming from? How did he

become who he was? And what I wanted to look at in this book was the people who sustained him,

the people who enabled him, who made it possible for him to give all that he did to the world.

And we were talking a little bit before, but you have very strong opinions about the greatness of

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