In a letter to his close friend Mary Painter in 1957, James Baldwin recounts how an extended trip to Corsica enabled him ‘to get his private and public lives in something resembling alignment. For otherwise, I’ll not have either.’ Aged thirty-three, Baldwin had spent almost a decade living in France. As he recalled in the title essay of his first collection of non-fiction, Notes of a Native Son (1955), his life had been ‘in danger’ in the United States, ‘not from anything other people might do but from the hatred I carried in my own heart’.

As the title of Nicholas Boggs’s compelling biography suggests, Baldwin had other reasons for leaving the United States. After a series of doomed relationships, often with men who were mostly attracted to women – a pattern that would rarely change – Baldwin craved domestic stability while acknowledging that his art was driven by the very chaos that drove him to despair. ‘One writes out of one thing only – one’s own experience,’ he stated in Notes of a Native Son, adding, ‘This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.’

Baldwin: A Love Story, a chronological survey of the writer’s life and work, leans heavily on earlier biographies, including Fern Marja Eckman’s The Furious Passage of James Baldwin (1966; largely constructed through interviews) and W J Weatherby’s journalistic James Baldwin: Artist on Fire (1989), as well as David Leeming’s intimate