James Baldwin’s Life and Loves in France

A monumental new biography of James Baldwin was published this summer, in coordination with the centennial of his birth. Nicholas Boggs’s Baldwin: A Love Story traces Baldwin’s prolific career and extraordinary life through his romantic relationships—some already known, some being explored for the first time in full. Baldwin was fascinated by the idea of love, writing about it in all of its forms: platonic, spiritual, sexual, and romantic. An example of the unclassifiable relationships he engaged in was with the writer Samuel Clemens Floyd III. The food historian and ethnographer Jessica B. Harris, who also was in a relationship with Clemens Floyd after he and Baldwin transitioned to friendship, wrote movingly about Baldwin and this man in her remarkable 2018 memoir, My Soul Looks Back. There, she details her life with this extraordinary community of Black creatives that also included Nina Simone, Maya Angelou, and Toni Morrison. Here, Harris and Boggs speak with Bazaar about James Baldwin, his love for entertaining, and parties and writing in the ’80s in the South of France.