“Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does,” James Baldwin said in an address he delivered at Kalamazoo College in 1960 and published in 1961. “Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.”

The same could be said of the writing process. 

Nicholas Boggs, CAS/MFA ’09, devoted more than 20 years to researching and writing Baldwin: A Love Story. Released in August to critical acclaim, the 720-page instant bestseller is a monumental and definitive portrait of the intimate relationships that shaped Baldwin’s politics, activism, and writing.  Drawn from newly uncovered letters, archives, and interviews, the book—a finalist for the prestigious Kirkus Prize and the darling of myriad “best of” 2025 lists—is the first biography of Baldwin in three decades.

Here, Boggs reflects on his battle to write the book, the power of love as a biographical lens, and his own “growing up” as a writer at AU.

Q. You spent years living inside Baldwin’s world. When you began writing, did you have a road map for the book, or did the final shape only reveal itself to you along the way?

A. I definitely did not know what the book would become when I set out because that was over 20 years ago. I had discovered Baldwin’s out-of-print children’s book, Little Man, Little Man, as an undergraduate, and then in the early 2000s, I found out that the book’s illustrator, French artist Yoran Cazac—whom I had been told from a reputable source was deceased—was actually alive. It turned out he was Baldwin’s last great love, and I’m the only biographer who had the chance to interview him in person before he died in 2005.

Q. Why was love the guiding lens for understanding Baldwin?

A. I write at the end of my author’s note in my book that it took me years to realize that what I was researching and trying to write for decades was a new Baldwin biography, but from the very beginning, I always knew it was a love story.

But as my research expanded, I realized that Baldwin’s entire life and work was a love story. All his novels are love stories, and love is at the core of his political writing. The Fire Next Time, for example, is all about how Black and white Americans must come together like lovers, he writes, in order to truly see each other and relate to each other, and, in his words, “make freedom real.” And now, of course, his legacy has become a love story because so many readers and people love not just his work, but who he was as a person and what he represents: some measure of hope in very hateful times.

Q. In the book, you show how Baldwin’s closest relationships shaped his writing and identity. What did spending years inside those connections teach you about how love and creativity inform each other?

A. They are inseparable. Baldwin wrote from a place of love—he dedicated his books to the painter Beauford Delaney, his “spiritual father”; to his greatest love, Lucien Happersberger; to the Turkish actor Engin Cezzar, his collaborator and “blood brother,” as he called him; and finally to Cazac. He loved his family and also Mary Painter, his best friend in Paris, to whom he dedicated Another Country. In fact, in his voluminous letters to Painter, it becomes very clear how intertwined his creative process was with the push and pull of his romantic entanglements and how connected it all was in his journey toward self-love.

He grew up being told he was ugly, a sissy, which led him to see love as a battle, a war, a growing up, as he put it. And he used these insights—this hard-won self-love—to reflect on what it means to try to live up to the democratic ideals of the country of his birth, a country that he loved but with a love that, in its own way, was very difficult for him to keep believing in and striving for, and yet somehow he did, even if it meant spending most of his life abroad.

Q. You once sat where AU’s writing students do. What would you tell them about maintaining faith in their work during the long, uncertain process of completing a book?

A. Baldwin wrote that talent is insignificant, that he knew a lot of “talented ruins.” He might have been exaggerating a bit (talent does matter, I think) but what matters even more is perseverance, hard work, and love. And that’s really true when it comes to being and becoming a writer. So I would say that sticking with it and loving what you do—these are the most important attributes to becoming a writer.

Q. Looking back at your time in AU’s MFA program, which moments, mentors, or lessons still echo in your work?

A. I completed my PhD at Columbia in 2005, and in my mid-30s I moved back to DC, my hometown (I grew up just a few blocks away from AU and went to elementary school at Horace Mann), for my MFA. It was an unusual chronology; most people who do both an MFA and PhD do it in that order. So I was pretty old for an MFA student. But it was one of the best things that ever happened to me. I was finally ready to become a writer.

And, in fact, it was in that MFA program that I wrote the first paragraphs of this book because I was there to work on both creative nonfiction and fiction. Specifically, I began working on the section when I was tracking down Yoran Cazac and emerged as a kind of character myself. Pulling that off really required the kind of excellent teaching and guidance I received at AU from teachers like Richard McCann, Andrew Holleran, and E.J. Levy.

And now I am returning to the novella that I wrote as my MFA thesis at AU so many years ago to help shape my next book, which mixes fiction and memoir. Much like my Baldwin biography, it’s a project that has had to germinate for years and changed directions several times. That’s just how I work, how I write, and I’m so grateful that AU provided me the space and springboard for these two books. I often tell people how much the late and great Richard McCann changed my life, and it’s true.

Q. If Baldwin could read A Love Story, what do you hope he’d recognize in your portrait of him?

A. I hope he’d recognize it as more than a portrait of himself, but rather as a portrait of himself in relation to those he loved and who loved him and how they mutually sustained and transformed each other. He had a large table at his home in the South of France that he called the “Welcome Table,” and the play he was working on when he died had that as its title. It was where his friends and loved ones would gather for food and drink and talk and laughter—everyone from his lovers to Nina Simone, Toni Morrison, Marlon Brando, and Miles Davis; the list goes on and on. Sometimes Baldwin’s life is thought of as a tragedy or all-suffering, but I try to show that it was also full of love and communion and fellowship with his chosen family. I hope he would recognize this truth in my portrayal of him and those he loved. I hope he’d feel the love.

Excerpt from Baldwin: A Love Story by Nicholas Boggs 

The bar in question was just a short walk from the restaurants and cafés nestled at the crossroads of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, their legendary names lit up in lights—Café de Flore, Les Deux Magots, and Café Royal, not to mention Le Select and Brasserie Lipp. But to enter La Reine Blanche on this winter night in 1949 just a few days after Christmas was to step into what felt like an entirely different world. Gone were the clusters of British and American expatriates cadging cigarettes as they table-hopped and indulged in the myth of postwar Paris popularized by their predecessors, most notably Hemingway, Stein, and Pound. Instead the ambiance conjured by the Art Deco chic of these establishments, replete with purple moleskin banquettes and Charley Garry–painted ceiling, was replaced by a charmless door beyond which a long, poorly lit tunnel thick with cigarette smoke was filled to capacity with throngs of men laughing and talking as they stood at the bar or leaned against the walls, eyeing each other and sipping suggestively from their drinks.

On most nights there was not a single woman in sight except for the bar’s patronne, Madame Alice. Rarely moving from her perch on a high seat in front of the cash register, she was described by one habitué as “an impassive mountain of stone, surmounted by a tightly pulled and smoothly sculpted mound of cold stone-grey hair. Her flesh was grey,” the account goes on, “and she dressed in grey. But for a twitch at the corners of her mouth, [her] welcoming smile disturbed no muscle in her face.” A bouncer was never required, it was also said, because when she deigned to move, however slowly that might be, she could still “effortlessly manhandle the roughest of her clients.” Of which there were more than a few. The bar, after all, “thickly populated by trade, was cruising territory,” and the frequency of police raids meant customers knew if they had forgotten to carry their identification papers, then they should consider going elsewhere that night.

La Reine Blanche, of course, translates into “The White Queen,” and on most nights that would appear to be a perfect description of most of its clientele. But tonight the figure holding court was most likely the only non-white patron in the place. From a distance, it must have looked like a group of men gathered around no person at all, so diminutive was the storyteller at the center of their attention. But if one waded through the crowd and made their way to join them, invariably they would have been struck by an unmistakable sight in their midst: a twenty-five-year-old Black American with large, animated eyes talking a mile a minute in his broken and barely intelligible yet irrepressibly enthusiastic rendition of the French language, a drink in one hand and his signature cigarette in the other, which he was waving in concert with his words. 

He was by now no stranger to the denizens of La Reine Blanche, which had become his regular haunt. “Have you met Jimmy Baldwin?” was a not infrequent question passed along to newcomers among the American set in particular. Indeed, for many of them, “Meeting Jimmy” was an integral part of their induction into life on the Left Bank. Flanking him that evening were two of the closest friends he’d made since his arrival in Paris just over a year ago. The first was a German Jewish man in his midforties called Sacha (né Albrecht) Niederstein, who had come from Berlin in the early 1930s and lived in the South of France under a false name to evade the Nazis. He now resided in a large studio on avenue de Ségur with prominently displayed paintings by André Lhote and Moïse Kisling. He was renowned for the famously fastidious meals he concocted in his kitchen hung with copper pots and pans and over which he graciously dispensed avuncular wisdom to his evening visitors, most especially to one James Baldwin. The second friend was Tom Michaelis, a German American attorney who was fast becoming something of a benefactor to Baldwin, whom he deemed a “genius,” and who was in any case a key figure in the outrageous story Baldwin was now telling of the stolen bedsheet, or le drap de lit, which was building furiously toward its dramatic denouement. 

Tom and Sacha had heard it before, so as the audience listened with rapt horror and glee, the two of them were focused instead on an unfamiliar face that had joined the group. It belonged to a slender, handsome, and shaggy-haired seventeen-year-old Swiss would-be painter who had recently fled his feuding parents in Lausanne and arrived in Paris virtually penniless, much like Baldwin, to try to discover himself as an artist. With a mix of envy and pride Tom and Sacha noticed that the two men’s eyes had locked. They sensed immediately that they were witnessing something momentous. And they were right. For James Baldwin had just met the person he would come to call “the love of my life.”

His name was Lucien Happersberger.

Published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, August 2025. Copyright © 2025 by Nicholas Boggs. All rights reserved.