Baldwin: A Love Story Nicholas Boggs in Conversation with John McWhorter

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. Nicholas Boggs shows how Baldwin drew on the complex forces within these relationships — cultural, political, artistic, and erotic — and alchemized them into novels, essays, and plays that spoke truth to power, indelibly impacting the Civil Rights Movement and Black and queer literary history. Boggs speaks about the revealing new biography with John McWhorter, a columnist for The New York Times, author of the bestselling Nine Nasty Words and Woke Racism, and professor of linguistics at Columbia University.

Presented with the Leon Levy Center for Biography.