He spent decades on his James Baldwin biography. It’s out at the perfect moment.

In “Baldwin: A Love Story,” Nicholas Boggs offers the fullest portrait yet of how Baldwin’s romantic pursuits fed his creative ones.

By Sophia Nguyen

Nicholas Boggs describes himself as an “accidental biographer,” and his new book, “Baldwin: A Love Story,” as something he fell into.

“I don’t know if I should say this,” said Boggs, 51, “but when I got the book contract, I had never read a biography from start to finish.”

The book delves into the life of novelist and essayist James Baldwin through the lens of four of his most formative relationships. Drawing on the archives at Harlem’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, whose collection of Baldwin’s papers opened in 2017, Boggs’s research eventually took him to Corsica and Istanbul, physically retracing the writer’s steps. During the decades Boggs worked on the biography, Baldwin’s work — dismissed by some as passé by the time of his death in 1987, at 63 — became hugely popular, then venerated. The result is the fullest portrait yet of how Baldwin’s romantic pursuits fed his creative ones, and the first significant biography of Baldwin to be released by a major publisher in years.

“Boggs’s biography makes a hugely important contribution,” Louis Menand recently wrote in the New Yorker, “because it takes us to the heart of Baldwin’s message — the fear of love — and shows how urgent that problem was for him. Alongside the public crusade for civil rights, there was always, as Boggs shows us, a private search for a secure, loving relationship.” Read the full review at the Washington Post.