“They were against all categories,” says Nicholas Boggs of James Baldwin and the men he loved in this week’s episode of The World in Time. “They really were outsiders, all of them. Sometimes people think, oh, well, he was just drawn to these men who were essentially straight, like he had some kind of complex or something. Maybe. But he was also just drawn to these crazy outsiders. As Yoran Cazac put it, they were ‘eating the same substance,’ and they happened to be of different nationalities and races and even sexualities. I appreciate that they had these complicated relationships where they saw each other across difference for who they were and what they shared. It’s what sustained Baldwin. It’s what enabled him to write. It’s what he wrote about.”

 

This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn speaks with biographer Nicholas Boggs about Baldwin: A Love Story, a book three decades in the making. The episode follows James Baldwin on his transatlantic commutes, introducing listeners to four formative—and transformative—friendships with “crazy outsiders” that sustained Baldwin and that organize this new biography. We meet painter Beauford Delaney, the “spiritual father” and artistic mentor Baldwin found in Greenwich Village. In post-war Paris, we meet Lucien Happersberger, the Swiss émigré who would become Baldwin’s lover, muse, and lifelong friend. We meet Engin Cezzar, the “blood brother” who created for Baldwin a home in Istanbul. Finally, Boggs introduces us to Yoran Cazac, the French painter with whom Baldwin collaborated on his “child’s story for adults,” Little Man, Little Man, which Boggs helped bring back into print. Along the way, Boggs and Hohn dwell on the meaning of love in Baldwin’s life and work, and on his yearning for a home “by the side of the mountain, on the edge of the sea.” Hohn and Boggs also spend time with Otto Friedrich, who befriended Baldwin during his Paris years and would become Lewis Lapham’s editor and mentor. The episode concludes with a selection of entries about Baldwin from the journal Friedrich kept in 1949.

---

WORKS CITED

(In order of mention)

 

Nicholas Boggs. Baldwin: A Love Story. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2025.

 

James Baldwin. “Sonny’s Blues.” In Going to Meet the Man. New York: Vintage Books, 1995.

 

James Baldwin. Go Tell It on the Mountain. Introduced by Roxane Gay. New York: Vintage Books, 2024.

 

James Baldwin. Notes of a Native Son. Introduced by Edward P. Jones. Boston: Beacon Press, 2012.

 

James Baldwin. Giovanni’s Room. Introduced by Colm Tóibín. New York: Everyman’s Library, 2016.

 

James Baldwin. “Autobiographical Notes.” In Notes of a Native Son. Introduced by Edward P. Jones. Boston: Beacon Press, 2012.

 

James Baldwin. “Everybody’s Protest Novel.” In Notes of a Native Son. Introduced by Edward P. Jones. Boston: Beacon Press, 2012.

 

Richard Wright. Native Son. New York: Harper Perennial, 2023.

 

Beauford Delaney. In the Medium of Life: The Drawings of Beauford Delaney. New York: The Drawing Center, May 30–September 14, 2025.

 

Lorraine Hansberry. A Raisin in the Sun. New York: Vintage, 2004. 

 

Maya Angelou. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. New York: Random House, 2002.

 

Toni Morrison. The Source of Self-Regard. New York: Vintage, 2020.

 

James Baldwin. The Fire Next Time. New York: Vintage Books, 1992.

 

James Baldwin. Another Country. New York: Vintage Books, 1992.

 

Garth Greenwell. “Art and Friendship,” To a Green Thought, August 23, 2025.

 

Eros. Lapham’s Quarterly, Winter 2009.

 

Otto Friedrich. “Jimmy.” In The Grave of Alice B. Toklas: And Other Reports from the Past. New York: Henry Holt & Company, 1989.

 

James Baldwin. “Stranger in the Village.” In Notes of a Native Son. Introduced by Edward P. Jones. Boston: Beacon Press, 2012.
 

Hannah Arendt. “We Refugees.” In Altogether Elsewhere: Writers on Exile. Edited by Marc Robinson. Boston & London: Faber and Faber, 1994.

 

Walter Benjamin. The Arcades Project. Translated and edited by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2002.
 

Ernest Hemingway. Death in the Afternoon. New York: Scribner, 1996.

 

Donovan Hohn. “Episode 5: Ben Tarnoff and John Jeremiah Sullivan.” The World in Time from Lapham’s Quarterly, July 4, 2025.

 

Harmony Holiday. “Preface to James Baldwin’s Unwritten Suicide Note,” The Poetry Foundation, August 9, 2018.

 

David Leeming. James Baldwin: A Biography. New York: Arcade Books, 2015.
 

Lizzie Gottlieb. Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb. Sony Pictures Classics, 2022.

 

Imani Perry. Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People. New York: Ecco, 2025.
 

Woody Allen. Zelig. Orion Pictures, 1983.

 

David Leeming. “David Leeming Collection of James Baldwin Research.” Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University.

 

Countee Cullen. Copper Sun. Lincoln: University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries, 2022.

 

Sarah Schulman. The Cosmopolitans. New York: Feminist Press, 2016.

 

James Baldwin. “Equal in Paris.” In Notes of a Native Son. Introduced by Edward P. Jones. Boston: Beacon Press, 2012.

 

Zadie Smith. Feel Free: Essays. New York: Penguin Books, 2018.

 

Lewis H. Lapham. “Merlin’s Owl,” Roundtable from Lapham’s Quarterly, May 18, 2021.

 

Richard Olney. Reflexions. Introduced by Alice Waters. New York: Brick Tower Press, 2012.

 

Fern Marja Eckman. The Furious Passage of James Baldwin. New York: M. Evans & Company, 2014.

 

James Baldwin. Blues for Mister Charlie. New York: Vintage Books, 1995.
 

John Herbert. Fortune and Men’s Eyes. New York: Grove Press, 1968.

 

John Freely. Stamboul Ghosts: A Stroll Through Bohemian Istanbul. Introduced by Andrew Finkel. Edinburgh: Cornucopia Books/Caique Publishing, 2018.

 

Magdalena J. Zaborowska. James Baldwin’s Turkish Decade: Erotics of Exile. Durham: Duke University Press, 2009.

 

Jesse McCarthy. The Blue Period: Black Writing in the Early Cold War. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2024.

 

James Baldwin: The FBI File. Edited and introduced by William J. Maxwell. New York: Arcade Books, 2017.

 

James Baldwin and Yoran Cazac. Little Man, Little Man: A Story of Childhood. Edited by Nicholas Boggs and Jennifer Devere Brody. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018.

 

Otto Friedrich. “Notes on a Native Son: An Excerpt from ‘Jimmy.’” Roundtable from Lapham’s Quarterly, September 12, 2025.