Nicholas Boggs was an undergraduate when he discovered James Baldwin’s out-of-print children’s book, Little Man, Little Man: A Story of Childhood, in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. After he tracked down its illustrator, the French artist Yoran Cazac, he went on to coedit an acclaimed new edition of the book in 2018. His writing has also been anthologised in The Cambridge Companion to James Baldwin, James Baldwin Now, and Speculative Light: The Arts of Beauford Delaney and James Baldwin. He is the recipient of a 2023 Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Beinecke Library and Gilder Lehrman Center at Yale, the Schomburg Center Scholars-in-Residence Program, the National Humanities Center and the Eccles Center for American Studies at the British Library, as well as residencies at Yaddo and MacDowell. He received his BA in English from Yale, his MFA in creative writing from American University, and his PhD in English from Columbia. Born and raised in Washington, DC, he lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Nicholas Boggs’ monumental biography considers James Baldwin through the prism of love, placing four beloved men at the centre of his writing, his activism, his political consciousness, his philosophy and his life. We have been presented with many partial Baldwins over the years, but here is the whole loveable man: the radical and the celebrity, the civil rights hero and the downtown playwright, the cosmopolitan jet-setter and the son of East Harlem. Compulsively interesting and beautifully written, there is something to treasure on every page. I absolutely loved it

Nicholas Boggs was an undergraduate when he discovered James Baldwin’s out-of-print children’s book, Little Man, Little Man: A Story of Childhood, in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. After he tracked down its illustrator, the French artist Yoran Cazac, he went on to coedit an acclaimed new edition of the book in 2018. His writing has also been anthologised in The Cambridge Companion to James Baldwin, James Baldwin Now, and Speculative Light: The Arts of Beauford Delaney and James Baldwin. He is the recipient of a 2023 Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Beinecke Library and Gilder Lehrman Center at Yale, the Schomburg Center Scholars-in-Residence Program, the National Humanities Center and the Eccles Center for American Studies at the British Library, as well as residencies at Yaddo and MacDowell. He received his BA in English from Yale, his MFA in creative writing from American University, and his PhD in English from Columbia. Born and raised in Washington, DC, he lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Nicholas Boggs’ monumental biography considers James Baldwin through the prism of love, placing four beloved men at the centre of his writing, his activism, his political consciousness, his philosophy and his life. We have been presented with many partial Baldwins over the years, but here is the whole loveable man: the radical and the celebrity, the civil rights hero and the downtown playwright, the cosmopolitan jet-setter and the son of East Harlem. Compulsively interesting and beautifully written, there is something to treasure on every page. I absolutely loved it