Full Bio: Nicholas Boggs's 'Baldwin: A Love Story'

Summary

All Of It – Full Bio: Nicholas Boggs's "Baldwin: A Love Story"

Host: Alison Stewart
Guest: Nicholas Boggs, author
Date: September 20, 2025

---

Episode Overview

In this multi-part Full Bio feature, Alison Stewart interviews Nicholas Boggs about his book, Baldwin: A Love Story, the first major biography of James Baldwin in thirty years. The book, and the conversation, explore Baldwin’s life through the lens of love—romantic, platonic, familial, and creative—and examine how love influenced his literature, activism, and sense of self. Drawing on new archival material and personal correspondence, Boggs paints a portrait of Baldwin not just as a writer and civil rights leader, but as a complex, loving, and flawed human being.

---

Key Discussion Points

1. Writing Baldwin's Biography: New Resources and Approaches

• New Archival Material
  The Schomburg Center’s acquisition of Baldwin’s archives in 2017 provided Boggs with unprecedented access to letters and documents.

  “Being able to interview [David Leeming] extensively was also kind of new. I was the first person to do that.” (03:11, Nicholas Boggs)

• Interviews and Oral Histories
  Boggs transcribed hours of unreleased interviews and tracked down people who knew Baldwin personally, expanding the narrative beyond previous biographies.
• Evolving Purpose
  Boggs initially set out to bring Baldwin's children's book, Little Man, Little Man, back into print, but the project expanded into a love-centered biography as archival evidence grew.

2. The Meaning and Centrality of Love in Baldwin's Life and Work

• Book's Mantra
  A little-known Baldwin quote—"Love is the only reality, the only terror and the only hope"—frames the book's exploration.

  “He lived his entire life about love, not just his relationships, but his writing was all about love.” (04:50, Nicholas Boggs)

• Love as Metaphor and Political Tool Baldwin urged black and white Americans to "turn to each other like lovers," using love as both a personal force and a model for social progress.

3. Early Life: Family, Harlem, and the Journey to Self-Love

• Family Dynamics
  Baldwin’s close relationship with his mother and complex, fraught connection to his stepfather, whom he did not know was not his biological father until much later.

  “His father would call him frog eyes. So that was a difficult relationship, to be sure, that he wrote about to great effect in... Notes of a Native Son.” (06:58, Nicholas Boggs)

• Responsibility and Childhood
  As the eldest of nine, Baldwin bore enormous responsibilities, often feeling he "never fully [was] a child."
• Impact of Bullying and Parental Criticism
  Being called “ugly” and a “sissy” deeply wounded him and fueled his demanding journey toward self-acceptance.

  “Baldwin's journey to self love is sort of part of the whole subject of this book… he calls love a battle, love is a war, love is a growing up.” (10:14, Nicholas Boggs)

4. Mentorship and Community: Key Figures in Baldwin’s Development

• Orilla "Bill" Miller
  Baldwin’s teacher who recognized his genius, nurtured his love for literature and theater, and exposed him to New York’s broader cultural scene.

  "It was Bill Miller who helped me escape what he called the trap of color. And he said, it's also because of her that I never managed to hate white people. Although, he added, I did wish to murder more than a few." (12:48, Nicholas Boggs referencing Baldwin)

• Countee Cullen
  As a teacher and Harlem Renaissance icon, Cullen modeled an alternative version of Black manhood and possible artistic futures.
• DeWitt Clinton School and Early Writing
  Peers like Richard Avedon and involvement in literary magazines helped Baldwin refine his voice.

5. Love and Collaboration as Organizing Principles

Part 1: Buford Delaney – Spiritual Father

• Meeting Delaney
  …sparked by a school acquaintance; Delaney introduced Baldwin to jazz, blues, and a new visual appreciation for the world.
• Mentorship and Mutual Complications
  Their relationship blended the spiritual, paternal, and ambiguously erotic.

  “There was this kind of eroticism...and this often happened to Baldwin.” (17:28, Nicholas Boggs)

• Art, Race, and Sexuality
  Delaney’s mentorship offered both affirmation and tension; their dynamic fueled later themes in Baldwin’s work regarding the performative aspects of identity.

Part 2: Lucien Habersberger – The Paris Years

• The Love of Baldwin’s Life
  Lucien, a young aspiring painter, became Baldwin’s lover and artistic muse in Paris (31:22).

  “Lucien was his lover, his great love. He’s really the prototype...of this kind of romantic, idyllic situation where he’s being taken care of by a lover and writing his great works.” (32:14, Boggs)

• Creative Partnership
  Lucien nursed Baldwin through illness and provided space, inspiration, and emotional complexity for Baldwin’s major works.
• Intersections with Race and Sexuality Lucien's unconditional acceptance allowed Baldwin to envision love—and hence social transformation—that transcended race and sexual categories.

Other Key Figures

• Mary Painter
  An American economist and intellectual, whose friendship with Baldwin offered emotional and creative support, and whose letters provide unique insights into Baldwin’s process (34:53).
• Joran Kazak
  French painter and collaborator on Little Man, Little Man, subject of the fourth part of Boggs’s book.

6. Exile, Return, and the Global Frame

• Paris and Switzerland
  Paris offered Baldwin both escape and creative space; Switzerland (the setting for "Stranger in the Village") deepened his critical understanding of race and 'innocence.'

  “He almost needed the experience of being a total outsider. He was comfortable in that, in a way, because that’s how he felt growing up in Harlem.” (37:06, Nicholas Boggs)

• Turkey
  Istanbul became a refuge where Baldwin finished pivotal works (Another Country, The Fire Next Time) and found creative rejuvenation.

  “Turkey saved his life because this was a moment when he was once again really, really down...He just feels reborn.” (56:04, Nicholas Boggs)

7. The Civil Rights Movement: From Reluctant Witness to Icon

• Baldwin as Witness
  Emphasized bearing witness rather than assuming the role of a spokesman or organizer.

  “He saw himself, though, not as a spokesman, but as a witness.” (60:39, Boggs)

• High-profile Activism
  Debates (William F. Buckley), media appearances, and meetings with RFK positioned Baldwin in the center of cultural and political debates.
• Blues for Mr. Charlie and Activist Theater
  Resistance to censorship in theater reflected Baldwin's insistence on telling hard truths, even at personal and professional risk.

  “Here Baldwin was acting like...the closing of the play was the march on Washington, right? And he, like, got a pamphlet going and got all his famous friends involved…” (63:03, Boggs)

8. Fame, Flaws, and Financial Instability

• Charmed Survival, Messy Logistics
  Despite charisma and network, Baldwin was "always broke," often reliant on loans and the generosity of friends.
• Complicated Relationships
  Baldwin could be difficult in daily life, careless with money and belongings, but always passionate about art and community.
• Mental Health
  Struggled with depression and suicidal thoughts—compounded by society’s racism, homophobia, and personal trauma.

  “The larger issue is more social. I mean, it’s just the way that he grew up as a sensitive, brilliant black man in an America that did not want him and did not treat him correctly.” (47:12, Boggs)

9. The FBI and Surveillance

• Constant Monitoring
  Baldwin was acutely aware the FBI followed him.

  "He would joke about it: ‘give my regards to J. Edgar when you try to reach me.’...The files themselves reflect something quite different. He says all the time, like, you know, is he a pervert?" (66:37, 68:01, Boggs)

• Sexuality, Race, and Hoover’s Obsession
  Baldwin characterized J. Edgar Hoover as "the 20th century’s greatest voyeur," noting how the surveillance regime’s attitudes mirrored dominant culture’s fear and voyeurism towards queer and Black lives.

10. Little Man, Little Man and Lost Histories

• Rediscovery of a Children's Book
  Baldwin’s only children’s book, co-created with Joran Kazak, foregrounded Black urban childhood in vernacular English.

  “A children’s book for adults...it was really sort of just very subversive for its time.” (69:16, Boggs)

• Research Journey
  Boggs’s search for Kazak, thought to be dead, epitomizes how new biographical discoveries remain possible in the digital age.

11. Later Years and Legacy

• AIDS, Silence, and Structural Critique
  Baldwin only addressed HIV/AIDS in depth once, but anticipated how the epidemic would be weaponized against marginalized communities.

  “He was very, I think, prescient and very right about what was happening and sort of the psychological and the psycho-political dimensions of how HIV and AIDS was mobilized…” (73:03, Boggs)

• Death and Evolving Memory
  Baldwin died of stomach cancer in 1987. Boggs and Stewart reflect on how his legacy has since grown, imagining how obituaries might be written today.

  “I think now it’s fully understood… that he is one of, if not the most important writer of the 20th century.” (75:27, Boggs)

---

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Baldwin’s code in love:
  “Baldwin had a code in love. And it could be very hard on people. You know, I think it was…because he grew up, quote, unquote, illegitimate, he had this sense, he said, well, listen, you have to marry her.” (38:16, Boggs)
• On the importance of love in activism:
  “He called on black and white Americans to turn to each other like lovers. Right. He was being metaphorical here…but to sort of try to understand each other the way that lovers must.” (04:54, Boggs)
• On the trauma of being an outsider:
  “He almost like, needed the experience of being a total outsider. He was comfortable in that, in a way, because that’s how he felt growing up in Harlem.” (37:06, Boggs)
• On finding the Corsica house:
  “Always bring your mother. And it was from Corsica that he wrote this gorgeous letter to his own mother that is really important.” (49:32, Boggs)
• On the FBI’s surveillance:
  “Baldwin called Hoover like the 20th century’s greatest voyeur, something like that. So I think Hoover...was kind of titillated by Baldwin in a certain sense.” (68:01, Boggs)
• On Baldwin’s legacy:
  “It really felt right for it to be a love story. So it really has kind of been a love fest since it came out. And I can’t complain.” (76:26, Boggs)

---

Timestamps for Major Segments

• Beginnings & Archives – 00:38–04:34
• Childhood, Family, and Harlem – 06:01–11:05
• Teachers/Mentors: Bill Miller & Countee Cullen – 11:10–14:33
• Buford Delaney (Spiritual Father) – 15:09–19:25
• Delaney, Sexuality, and Self-Discovery – 19:56–21:29
• Marlon Brando & Celebrity Friendship – 21:29–22:23
• Artistic Life & Early Struggles – 22:23–24:26
• Richard Wright & Publishing Hurdles – 24:21–25:30
• Rosenwald Fellowship & Expatriation – 25:30–26:46
• Lucien Habersberger & Paris Years – 30:59–34:31
• Mary Painter and Creative Community – 34:31–36:06
• Switzerland and Outsider Reflections – 36:11–38:01
• Release of Go Tell It On The Mountain, Literary Reception – 41:17–43:13
• Giovanni’s Room and Gay American Literature – 43:33–44:35
• Financial Instability, Yaddo Residency, & Artistic Process – 44:35–47:14
• Corsica, Depression, and Political Awakening – 49:10–52:08
• Civil Rights, Activism, and Moral Responsibility – 54:38–61:41
• Blues for Mr. Charlie & Broadway Activism – 61:41–63:53
• Kennedy Meeting & Strategic Activism – 64:26–66:34
• FBI Surveillance & Sexuality – 66:34–68:43
• Little Man, Little Man & Research Journey – 68:43–71:53
• Baldwin and HIV/AIDS – 71:55–74:15
• Upon Baldwin’s Death: Legacies and Obituaries – 74:15–75:43
• Reflections on the Book’s Reception & Legacy – 75:45–77:14

---

Final Thoughts

This in-depth interview delves into the intersections of love, art, sexuality, and activism in James Baldwin’s life. Drawing on new resources and a fresh interpretive lens, Nicholas Boggs paints a nuanced portrait of Baldwin’s humanity and enduring relevance. Whether you are new to Baldwin or a longtime admirer, this episode provides both critical insights and compelling storytelling about a literary giant whose understanding of love shaped not only his art, but his efforts to reshape a broken society.

Transcript

[Multicare Announcer]

Our state has changed a lot in the last 140 years. We know because Multicare has been here guided by a single making our communities healthier. That comes from making courageous decisions, partnering with local communities to grow programs and services, and expanding healthcare access to those who need it most. Together, we're building a healthier future. Learn [e-mail].

[Alison Stewart]

This is all of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. Full Bio is our book series where we spend a few days with the author of a deeply researched biography to get a fuller understanding of the subject. Today we will be talking with Nicholas Boggs, the author of A Love Story. Boggs spent more than a decade working on this 700 page book, and it is the first major biography of the literary giant in 30 years. James Baldwin was the author of the novels Go Tell it on the Mountain, Giovanni's Room, Another country, if Beale Street Could Talk, as well as essays like Notes of a Native Son and Plays like blues for Mr. Charlie. He was a thinker, a communicator, a civil rights leader and a lover. And this book shows how intertwined all those attributes were in his writing. Baldwin A Love Story is just over 700 pages long. So we'll get into Bogg's work in a few important moments. You'll have to read the book to get the rest. Young James Baldwin began his life as a preacher's son in Harlem, and he became a boy preacher himself. Here's Baldwin talking to fresh air in 1986.

[James Baldwin]

Well, it was almost inevitable, you know, being raised that way. And after all, not doubting anything my father said, not doubting the gospel, not doubting the church, you know, and at the time of puberty, when everybody goes through a storm, you know, the storm of self discovery, the storm of self contempt, the storm of terror of who is this self which is suddenly, suddenly evolving, you know, suddenly is distinguishing itself from other selves and all of these things and the sexual question, of course, you know, all of these things sort of coalesce into some kind of hurricane in a way, you know. And in that hurricane, what did I do? I reached out for the only thing I could, which I knew to cling to, and that was the Holy Ghost.

[Alison Stewart]

Let's get into Baldwin A Love Story with Nicholas Boggs, our choice for full bio. All right. So this is the first big biography of James Baldwin since 1994's David Leeming's book. What resources did you have that biographers before didn't?

[Nicholas Boggs]

Well, the Schomburg acquired a collection of Baldwin's Matir Hill's massive one in 2017 and I got the book contract in 2018. But David Leeming, I'm glad you brought him up because he. He himself was actually an incredible resource. He was Baldwin's friend, his personal secretary. He did hours of interviews with him that are also available at the Beinecke that had never been transcribed, that I spent most of the pandemic transcribing. So being able to interview him extensively was also kind of new. I was the first person to do that. So archives at speaking with people and then people that I. Several people that I tracked down who.

[Alison Stewart]

Knew Baldwin personally over the course of writing this book, how did it change from what your original intention was going to be?

[Nicholas Boggs]

Well, that depends when you say this book, when I started working on it, since I got the book contract, it's pretty similar. I just added one figure. There were three figures of these major loves of his life. Buford Delaney, Lucien Habersberger and Jorah Kazak. I added Engin Jazzar, these. This Turkish actor who was very important to him. But I didn't actually realize I was writing a biography. I was researching this really for more than 20 years, trying to bring Little Man, Little Man, Baldwin's children's book back into print, trying to write about his last great love affair with the collaborator of that book. And it was only around the time that the archives became available in 2017 that I began to understand that there was a whole biography here told through his great loves.

[Alison Stewart]

You start the book with the James Baldwin quote, unquote, Love is the only reality, the only terror and the only hope. How does your book support that belief?

[Nicholas Boggs]

That is sort of a mantra that he lived by, even though that was just. Actually, that's at the Schwarzman Building, New York Public Library. It's just like something he wrote to a friend on the back of a postcard or something. So this is not a well known Baldwin quote, but I came upon it and I thought, gosh, this really explains the. So much of his. So much of his life, I mean, he lived his entire life was about love, not just his relationships, but his writing was all about love. Think about the fire next time when he said only love will throw open the gates. Right. He called on black and white Americans to turn to each other like lovers. Right. He was being metaphorical here, but to sort of try to understand each other the way that lovers must. So love was everywhere in his sort of political writing. And of course, all of his novels are love stories. Right. Giovanni's Room is a great love story, love triangle. Another country is a kind of tortured love story. Go Tell it in the Mountain is a subtextually kind of queer love story. His later novels are all about black queer love and the black family. So love is everywhere in his writing and everywhere in his life. And it really felt like a natural fit to take a look at the gaps in his love life and the people he dedicated his novels to, the people he collaborated with, to really understand Baldwin in all of his multiplicity.

[Alison Stewart]

We're talking to Nicholas Boggs. The name of the book is A Love Story. It's our choice. For full bio, I want to do a little biographical information about James Baldwin so that we can have these conversations. James Arthur Jones was born August 2, 1924 in Harlem Hospital to Emma Burtis Jones, a single mother, and she later married David Baldwin. What was James Baldwin's relationship with his mother like? What was his relationship with his stepfather?

[Nicholas Boggs]

Baldwin's relationship with his mother was extremely close and a beautiful one. And I had the great pleasure of drawing on a rare letter that he wrote to her from Corsica in this book that we can maybe talk about later. But growing up, she really, you know, she was working very hard as a housekeeper and all kinds of other jobs as a domestic. And his father was working a very difficult job on a soda factory in Long Island. That's his stepfather, but he called him his father and didn't know he was a stepfather until much later.

[James Baldwin]

So.

[Nicholas Boggs]

So the relationship with the mother was close, but also Baldwin was the oldest of nine children and he was really kind of her right hand man. He was responsible for raising these children. So it was complicated in that way because he was never fully a child almost. He had to grow up very quickly. His relationship with his stepfather was far more complicated. His stepfather. I open the book with this moment when James Baldwin goes and sees he's taken there by a schoolteacher to see Bette Davis on screen and he sees her eyes and. And he thinks, hold on a second. Those are like my mother's eyes. Those are like my eyes. But my father's been telling me that she's ugly and that I'm the ugliest boy in the world. And he realized that, in fact, no, my mother is beautiful and maybe I am too. So, you know, his father would call him frog eyes. So that was a difficult relationship, to be sure, that he wrote about to great effect in one of his major essays, Notes of a Native Son.

[Interviewer]

And you said he was the eldest of nine siblings?

[Nicholas Boggs]

That's correct.

[Interviewer]

And it seems that David is the sibling that is mentioned the most in your book. Why is that?

[Nicholas Boggs]

Well, Baldwin was close with all of his siblings, but David is the one who. I guess I just used the term right hand man. But David became Baldwin's right hand man throughout his life. He really was like his best friend, his protector. He lived with him in the south of France later in his life, but he also accompanied him on really important civil rights events and meetings with rfk. So Baldwin trusted him to the end and they had just a gorgeous relationship. He dedicated some literary works to his brother. You know, he came the first time he came back over from the States. He was kind of nervous that maybe his brother wouldn't be accepting of his sexuality. But as his brother later said to somebody, honey, I already knew. I always knew.

[Interviewer]

As you said, his relationship with his father, stepfather was complicated. His father was a deeply religious man. And it was very interesting that as a young man, James Baldwin decided to become a kid preacher. First of all, why did he take on this role of a preacher and did he believe it?

[Nicholas Boggs]

He took on the role for a complex set of reasons. The first of them being that he sort of, I think in a way, this was the only way that he could kind of be an artist. He saw himself as a writer, but that wasn't really. You weren't supposed to read books in his house. So this was a way to kind of work with language, work with words in a way that was kind of acceptable within his household. It also gave him a chance to kind of one up his father, which he in fact succeeded in doing pretty quickly. But the other pull of this was that he was afraid of his own sexuality as he was coming to realize it. And this gave him a community that was important, but it also gave him a chance to kind of further lie further the lie to himself.

[Alison Stewart]

And you mentioned earlier that he was just told that he was an ugly. An ugly child, an ugly boy. Was it his stepfather who did that?

[Nicholas Boggs]

His stepfather said that. But also kids at school would call him sissy and make fun of him. He was small, he was undersized, he was somewhat effeminate, and he was deeply bookish, obviously.

[Alison Stewart]

How did that affect his development?

[Nicholas Boggs]

I think it affected everything. I mean, he. Baldwin's journey to self love is sort of part of the whole subject of this book, right? And he calls love a battle, love is a war, love is a growing up. And he's talking about his own journey to self love, which the painter Buford Delaney down in Greenwich Village became his Spiritual father and painted portraits of him that allowed him to see him as a beautiful young man. So he overcame it. But the kind of interesting thing to me is how he took this struggle with self love and. And he sort of transposed it into his writing about America. So he used it as a sort of springboard to say, okay, this self love is risky and difficult, and so is the love between Americans. With this sort of tortured history of race in this country, if he could come to love himself, maybe there was a way that Americans could come together to love each other.

[Alison Stewart]

I love the story about a teacher.

[Interviewer]

Who took an interest in him, a.

[Alison Stewart]

24 year old named Orilla Miller. Is that I'm saying that correctly?

[Nicholas Boggs]

That's right. Although he called her Bill.

[Alison Stewart]

Bill. All right, we'll call her Bill. She was a teacher that he had at PS24 in Harlem. What did she see in a young James Baldwin?

[Nicholas Boggs]

It's a really beautiful story and thank you for asking that, because while the book focuses on these four great loves with men, he had so many important relationships with women.

[Alison Stewart]

With women.

[Nicholas Boggs]

True. Yes. Very formative. And she was after his mother. She was maybe the first. So she was on a sort of a fellowship at Teachers College and she was teaching. She came to work with students on drama and she just noticed that they were both reading A Tale of Two Cities at the same time. I mean, he was like 9 years old, 10 years old, and he had all of these fascinating things to say about it. She felt like she was. I mean, she was just absolutely blown away. Now there was a wonderful black woman, principal Gertrude Ayers there, who also realized how smart Baldwin was. But this was of course, an underfunded, understaffed school. So right away, Shegel sort of whisked her off to Bill Miller and he became her assistant with plays and stuff like that. She ended up coming to the Baldwin family household and asking for being granted eventually permission to take him out to see plays and movies. He went to see Macbeth with an all Haitian cast. I mean, this was really huge for him to see this on stage and see his people represented and to understand that he could do this himself someday.

[Interviewer]

And the family wasn't necessarily welcoming of her initially. What was so challenging about Ms. Miller?

[Nicholas Boggs]

I think it's less Ms. Miller than the milieu they were working. You have to remember how hard and working these parents were and how impoverished they were and how the only time they really saw white people were bill collectors, welfare workers, people who were not necessarily treating them fairly. Right. Trying to kick them out of their homes. So they were rightly skeptical of white people. But Bill was different, as Baldwin said. He said, it was Bill Miller who helped me escape what he called the trap of color. And he said, it's also because of her that I never managed to hate white people. Although, he added, I did wish to murder more than a few.

[Interviewer]

My guest is Nicholas Boggs. We're talking about his book A Love Story. It's our choice for full bio. When he was a young man, he met Countee Cullen, the poet. How did they meet?

[Nicholas Boggs]

He was his student in junior high school. I mean, this is the thing about Baldwin. For all the challenges he had, he also had these remarkable experiences of meeting people along the way, starting with Bill Miller, but then Countee Cullen. I mean, this huge figure of the Harlem Renaissance. He'd had a good Guggenheim. He lived in Paris, and Baldwin imitated his poetry. Now, Colin was also. And while they didn't talk about that, there's no doubt that there must have been some kind of recognition that, oh, here's a model of black manhood that's different from what his father was presenting to him as a mandate.

[Interviewer]

He was a bright boy. James Baldwin loved the library during his time at DeWitt Clinton. When did he first show signs of becoming a writer?

[Nicholas Boggs]

Well, he showed signs of becoming a writer sort of before. I mean, he had. In junior high school. It was already clear. He wrote the school song for the junior high school.

[Interviewer]

I didn't know that.

[Nicholas Boggs]

Yeah, he was already. But it was true that when he got there and he met people like Richard Avedon, were his classmates, Sol Stein, other folks who became important publishers, he suddenly was like, oh, here are some peers for me who are really interested in writing. He joined the Magpie, and there's wonderful poems and stories that I wrote that are you can find at the Schomburg and a little bit of the Beinecke. And I believe somebody's trying to put a collection of them together now, which would be wonderful. So this is where he, I think, really found his early voice. And that's also around the time that he started working on very early versions of what would become Go Tell it on the Mountain.

[Alison Stewart]

All right. Your book has four different parts to it. We talked about the prologue, sort of the biographical information. Let's get to part one. It's about his relationship with Buford Delaney, the artist. First of all, how did he meet Buford Delany?

[Nicholas Boggs]

Well, in fact, it was through DeWitt Clinton School. His friend Emile Capuya knew of this eccentric sort of famous black painter Named Beaufort Delany, who lived in the Village. And Baldwin was working in a sweatshop on Canal street, not far from where his studio was, we should point out.

[Alison Stewart]

Yeah, he didn't go to college.

[Nicholas Boggs]

No, no. This was actually while he was still in high school, that sweatshop. And he didn't go to college. He graduated late from high school later on. But he definitely went to the school of life and ended up schooling other people.

[Alison Stewart]

So he met Buford Delaney. He decides to go down to the Village. What else was in the Village that was interesting to him?

[Nicholas Boggs]

Well, I think at that point he was 16, and I think he kind of felt like a stranger in the Village. He wasn't spending that much time there until Buford took him under his wing, became his kind of spiritual father, Introduced him to jazz and blues, which he wasn't allowed to listen to in his home. It was God forsaken. He also taught him how to see the world as an artist. There's a famous story of walking down Broadway, so in the Village, and Buford says, look. And he points down at the gutter, and Baldwin doesn't see anything. And he says, look again. And Baldwin looks again, and he sees this. These distortions of buildings radiant in the water. And this was a lesson in seeing, certainly. But when Baldwin eventually moved down to Greenwich Village a few years later, he experienced the kind of bohemian lifestyle. Jack Kerouac and all those folks who were there. But he also experienced a new kind of racism that he hadn't experienced in the same way in Harlem. And he also experienced kind of being a target for that reason and also because of his sexuality. So this idea that Harlem was dangerous and. And Greenwich Village was liberated, he was disabused of that notion pretty quickly.

[Alison Stewart]

Delany's work can be seen in museums. An exhibit recently closed here in New York. It was gorgeous down on Green Street. There are pictures of Baldwin featured in it. And they very much positioned their relationship as a mentor, mentee, or even father like. Would you agree with that?

[Nicholas Boggs]

Yes. Baldwin called him his spiritual father, but it was a very complicated relationship, as I try to explore in the book. Baldwin was 16, and Buford was a very reticent, kind of prudish man, actually. But I think he kind of, you know, this is a different time we lived in. He kind of fell in love with Baldwin. But Baldwin, late in his life, in one of those amazing interviews that David Leeming did, he said, you know, that Buford never pushed any kind of romantic situation, that he accepted this kind of paternal role that he assigned him to. But that there was this kind of eroticism. And this often happened to Baldwin. There would be an eroticism sort of subtextually in a relationship early on. And then they would either become lovers or they would become friends or brotherly or some other kind of lifelong iteration. In the case of Buford, Buford became, as I said, his spiritual father. And he followed him to France. And Baldwin took care of him through the end of his life.

[Interviewer]

Yeah, Buford had a very difficult life. He dealt with mental health issues. And it always seemed that Baldwin was there to help him.

[Nicholas Boggs]

Yes, Baldwin felt a profound responsibility towards Beaufort Delany because he really felt that Buford had saved his life. He had provided him. He used to sing this Negro spiritual. Lord, Open the Unusual Door. And Baldwin really felt that that's what had happened in the village. He had showed him another way of living as an artist. He said this was the first time he realized that a black man could be an artist. Was meeting Buford.

[Interviewer]

Did they ever have disagreements?

[Nicholas Boggs]

Oh, yes, because there was this sort of underlying romantic interest. Buford would become quite envious when Baldwin was involved with other men like Lucien, Although he became very close with Lucien Habersberger. But no, he. And then as Baldwin became famous, I think Buford had feelings of, you know, I mean, really, he just wanted more time with Baldwin. Baldwin was all over the place. So it was very hard to keep up with him. But they had no. It was a. You know, it was a family relationship. And in the end, so it was a complicated one.

[Interviewer]

I want to read something that you wrote in the book. You write. Sexual roles, much like racial ones, were all a performance. And this dawning understanding of the connections between race and sex would fuel many of the insights of his mature writing in both fiction and nonfiction. His being James Baldwin. So in this period when he's late teens, early 20s, what was James Baldwin feeling about his sexual identity and was he interested in writing about it?

[Nicholas Boggs]

Well, great question. He was confused. I mean, he didn't have the language for it exactly. He knew he was, as he put it, a bastard. That's why he thought he was an outsider and strange child, as he was called. He hadn't quite made the connection with these stirrings of desire that he had. But it was while he was in the village that he started to say, as he didn't later in his life, he would say to friends when he met them, I'm a homosexual. Even though later he would kind of reject these labels. But he was experimenting with different ways of understanding himself. But the quote that you read is part of why he rejected these labels is that he saw these sort of married businessmen, right, with kids who would act one way, setting, and then he would see them at the bars or in the bathrooms or they'd be trying to sleep with them. And maybe he slept with more than one of them, he said. So he had this insight into sort of. Some of these were like straight, white heterosexual men. He understood that that's what I mean by a role, that it's a performance, right? And, of course, all these roles are really a performance. He understood that he was kind of some white women really interested in him in the Village because they wanted to take him home to their parents to kind of rebel and humiliate them.

[James Baldwin]

And.

[Nicholas Boggs]

And he saw that he was being asked to play a role. But this was useful to understand that these were roles, right? That in fact, if these are imposed by dominant society, we also have the power to create our own roles and to undermine these meanings that are attached to racial and sexual categories.

[Alison Stewart]

While we're in the Village, he meets a young actor, Marlon Brando, at the New School. And Brando will come in and out of his life. And what was the attraction between the two of them?

[Nicholas Boggs]

Well, they met at a urinal, so. But that doesn't mean anything necessarily. But they met at a urinal. They were. I think Brando was at the New School. And Baldwin called him a beautiful cat. And he said that Brando made him feel like he might not be ugly. I mean, he said that. He said. He also said he'd never met anyone like Brando who just did not care about race or would not abide by racism. So. So he was sort of shocked by. Brando was an original. And they would joke with each other about how they were both going to become famous writers and actors and sort of joking. But, of course, it ultimately happened. Their bond was deep, in part because they became fierce allies during the civil rights movement.

[Alison Stewart]

We'll talk about that a little bit later. My guest is Nicholas Boggs. The name of the book is A Love Story. It is our choice for a full bio, I have to say, and I knew this sort of intellectually, but I didn't know it practically. James Baldwin was always broke. It was amazing the amount of things he had to do to try to make money, whether it was to find his rent in Paris or even to find his way around the city. What were some of the ways that Baldwin early on made it work for himself financially or maybe didn't?

[Nicholas Boggs]

Charm, Charm. Endless charm. He was so charming. I think Richard Howard said. The poet Richard Howard said that he could talk his face away in a few minutes, which is not very nice thing to say. But what he meant by that is he could just charm the pants off of anybody. And it's true. But that doesn't mean that he didn't suffer. I mean, when he worked at that sweatshop and he worked laying track, and when he got to Paris, he. I don't know. You know, I don't know what he did in Paris to make money, though. That's a good question. There he kind of found a patron named Frank Price who gave him some money, and he scrounged around. And so he did borrow a bunch of money from Marlon Brando as well during that time, because Brando had started to hit it big. So, you know. But then when later, when he made money, he also gave it away very freely. He just. Money was not the thing that he. That mattered the most to him. I mean, he definitely wanted to be able to survive, but he was an artist. He truly was. That was his calling. And he would do whatever he had to do to get the time to write.

[Interviewer]

At one point, he was feeling sort of extremely low. He was having trouble getting jobs because he didn't have a college degree, couldn't get published in black newspapers. And then he's introduced to author Richard Wright.

[Nicholas Boggs]

Yes.

[Interviewer]

What did it mean to him to.

[Alison Stewart]

Be introduced to Richard Wright?

[Nicholas Boggs]

Well, I feel like this is my mantra. It was complicated, or it became complicated, but not at that moment. At that moment, he was absolutely thrilled. It was a friend in common. He was working on what he was calling in my father's house. That became early version of Go Tell in the mountain. And he took the train out to Brooklyn, and he went to Richard. He writes about this in one of his essays. He went. He went to meet Richard, whose wife was in the back with the baby. And it's a really funny story because Baldwin hadn't written much, and Wright asked him about the novel. He told him about it because he'd been drinking bourbon, and he pretended he had written, like, much more than he had. So then he had to go home the next week and write it quickly because Wright very generously put him in touch with the publisher for a grant. The publisher eventually turned it down, and that was very disappointing. But it was a first moment of Baldwin seeing, oh, you know, here's a black male writer, the most important black male writer in the world. You know, yet again, another example of, you know, this kind of Incredible coincidence and serendipity of Baldwin meeting these people.

[Interviewer]

Both Baldwin and Buford Delany applied for a Rosenwald Fellowship. Only Baldwin got it. And this stirred up all kinds of feelings for him. What did he have to consider if he took this money and then he took this money and he used it to go to France?

[Nicholas Boggs]

Well, he took this money and he used it. Actually, he gave it to his mother. He gave most of it to his mother because he was profoundly. He was beset with great guilt about. He was kind of the bread earner and he had these younger siblings. But he also sensed his best friend, Eugene Worth, had jumped off the George Washington Bridge to his death. Baldwin was sort of in love with him. He was seeing other friends beaten up. He'd been harassed. He kind of didn't kind of. He felt that he was next, that he was going to die if he stayed there. So there was this deep conflict between wanting to stay for his family, but he knew that he had to get away. And in a sense, it wasn't. It could be anywhere. It could have been England. It's good that it was France, but so he actually. I mean, this is sort of almost mythological and hard to imagine, but as he says in interviews, he gave almost all the money to his mother. And he only had $40 in his pocket after he bought the plane ticket when he flew over to France in 1948.

[Alison Stewart]

That was Nicholas Boggs, the author of A Love Story. Tomorrow on Full Bio, we'll hear about the person who was the love of Baldwin's life. This is all of it on wnyc. I'm Alison Stacy. We wanted to mark the passing of Robert Redford, the legendary actor turned director and founder of the Sundance Film Festival. Robert Redford was born in California in 1936. After dropping out of the University of Colorado, he worked for Standard Oil and then attended art school in Paris, where he sold his sketches on the street. He returned to the States to study acting in New York, receiving his first big break on Broadway in 1963 as the lead of Neil Simon's Barefoot in the park. In 1974, he starred in the screen version alongside Jane Fonda. His career continued to ascend. He became one of Hollywood's biggest stars of the 70s with a string of hits, including Jeremiah Johnson, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. The Sting with Paul Newman and All the President's Men. His tousled good looks and roles in films like the Way We Were, Three Days at the Condor and Out of Africa made him a sex symbol, if not a reluctant one. In 1980, he made his directorial debut with Ordinary People, which won him his only Oscar. He went on to direct films throughout the 2000s, including a river Runs through it, the Legend of Bagger Vance and the Horse Whisperer. Based in Utah since the early 60s, Redford rejected the trappings of Hollywood. He became an environmental activist and ardent independent film supporter, leading him to create the Sundance Institute, which which launched the Sundance Film Festival. According to his longtime publicist, he died at his home early this morning in his sleep. Robert Redford was 89. Full Bio is our book series where we spend a few days with the author of a deeply researched biography to get a fuller understanding of the subject. Today we'll be talking to Nicholas Boggs, the author of A Love Story. Boggs spent more than a decade working on this 700 page book, and it is the first major biography of the literary giant in nearly 30 years. James Baldwin was the author of novels like Go Tell it on the Mountain and if Beale Street Could Talk, as well as essays like Notes on a Native Son and Plays like blues for Mr. Charlie. But before that, we learned that he grew up in Harlem, spent his days in Greenwich Village, and earned a scholarship to go to Paris. All he wanted to do was write. As he told FRESH air, I worked.

[James Baldwin]

All day and I wrote all night, and I learned a lot. I began to be being published when I was 22. I had a fellowship when I was 21. And something else was happening too, though I didn't quite see it. I was defined as young Negro writer, and that meant that certain things were expected of a young Negro writer. And what was expected, I was not. I knew I was not about to deliver. What was expected was to I'm putting it very brutally, but what was expected was to accept the role of victim and to write from that point of view. And from my point of view, it seemed to me that to take such a stance would simply be to corroborate all of the principles which had you enslaved in the first place.

[Alison Stewart]

Baldwin spent most of his time in France, and it was there he met the love of his life, Lucien Hapisberger.

[Interviewer]

Here's Nicholas Boggs, author of Baldwin A Love. Our choice for full B.

[Alison Stewart]

Part two of the book is called Lucien the Paris Years 1948-1955. Lucien Habersberger, correct? Yes. Deeply important to James Baldwin. He's almost throughout the entire book. Giovanni's room is dedicated to him. But for the time being, in the seven period, the seven year period, who was Lucienne?

[Nicholas Boggs]

Lucien Habersberger was just 17 years old. He was a sort of a. Almost a street kid. He came to Paris, much like Baldwin, to become an artist. He wanted to become a painter. Baldwin had been there about a year and he had just gotten out of prison. Actually, it's a whole other story. And he was telling the story of how he got thrown into the prison and how he eventually got out. This becomes his great essay, Equal in Paris, he's at a gay bar called La Reine Blanche. And he's there, he locks eyes with him and they have this immediate attraction and they become. I think in the beginning it was more of a friendship. But when Baldwin falls ill and can't finish or can't really even get started on what becomes Gotel in the Mountain, Lucien tells his father that he has tuberculosis and can he use their Swiss chalet vacation spot and get some money. And he takes him there three times over the course of a couple years. The first time they go, he just nurses Baldwin back to health. And then they go on a climb on the mountain. And that's when Baldwin comes up with the title, Go Tell it on the Mountain. The second time he brings Bessie Smith records. And there he is, the only black man in the Swiss village. He eventually writes Stranger in the Village, really important essay about that experience. And he finishes the novel there on his third go. So Lucien was his lover, his great love. He's really the prototype for the rest of his life of this kind of romantic, idyllic situation where he's being taken care of by a lover and writing his great works. And they had an on again, off again relationship for their entire life. Lucienne ended up marrying a woman, having a couple kids, and then returning to his bedside at his death. They had a very rocky relationship at times as well. He ended up marrying the wonderful black actress Diana Sands, who was a friend of Baldwin's. So there was some drama there for sure.

[Alison Stewart]

Oh, yes, oh yes.

[Nicholas Boggs]

But there's a lot of love.

[Alison Stewart]

How did Lucien shape Baldwin's definition of love?

[Nicholas Boggs]

Utterly, utterly. And he writes about it when Lucien loved him and took him to Switzerland. And throughout that period, Baldwin writes that he just didn't think love was something possible for him. It was something that happened to other people, he says, but there it was belching up inside of me, as he put it. But importantly, Lucienne also. I mean, Baldwin talked about this kind of like. Kind of like Bill Miller let him kind of escape the trap of color. He didn't see. He didn't see race, not in that colorblind way. That we can sometimes confuse it with now. But he just didn't see Baldwin as a homosexual or a black man. He just saw him as someone that he loved. And that was really freeing for Baldwin to feel that way, to have someone else feel that way. And he understood that, you know, looking. He would write about how looking in your lover's eyes, right, That's. They see things in you, both your flaws, right, that's the risk, but that you have to confront within yourself. And you can only kind of do it together. And he used that as a kind of metaphor for talking about race relations eventually. So Lucien really helped him on a personal level, but also on an aesthetic level as a novelist and also on a political level.

[Interviewer]

There's a third person we should mention before this all takes off.

[Nicholas Boggs]

Mary Painter.

[Interviewer]

James Baldwin said, when I realized I couldn't marry Mary Painter, I realized I could marry no one. The three of them became fast friends. Would you share how she was instrumental in transforming these little bohemian groups in Paris into somewhat of a writer's community?

[Nicholas Boggs]

Well, she had the money for the alcohol. She did. She had a good deal with some whiskey company or something for real. But she is a fascinating figure. He ended up dedicating another country to her. She was an American economist who was living in Paris. She was involved in the Marshall Plan. Brilliant woman. Like, really brilliant woman. And so they were very different in a way, but they were both these incredible minds. They met at some stuffy brunch and they became such good friends. And the letters that are at the Beinecke that he wrote to her over the course of many years are absolutely extraordinary. He wrote to her from across the globe. I mean, Africa, Corsica, when he went to the south, importantly, his first trip in 1957. He wrote back to her about how transformative it was for him, but also terrifying it was. He could confide in her. But I think most importantly, for my purposes, writing the book, he really wrote about the connection between his love life and the creative process. Right. He would write about all of it. So these letters are also funny. I mean, there's lots of funny lines and postcards that he sent. So, you know, they became very, very, very close. And throughout, until through his death, as.

[Interviewer]

You mentioned, James Baldwin and Lucien went to Switzerland.

[Alison Stewart]

And Baldwin was able to complete, Go tell it on the mountain. He must have stuck out in this tiny town in Switzerland. How did it change him?

[Nicholas Boggs]

It changed him immensely. I mean, he has this line from the essay, Stranger in the Village. The world is white no longer, and it will never Be white again. And he already knew that. But he was using this, much as he used the experience of being in France to reflect back on the problems of race in America. Being in the Swiss village, I think it took it to a whole other level, right? He was realizing something about Western civilization, period. But he also saw, I think, importantly, that these little Swiss kids who were, you know, touching his hair and doing things that were. We would definitely find inappropriate now, there was a certain kind of innocence to them.

[Alison Stewart]

Naivete.

[Nicholas Boggs]

Naivete, not innocence. Because that's the essay. It's one of the essays where he's. Then that lets him talk about the false innocence of Americans. Right. That one of the problems in America is that white America refuses to confront its past and it refuses to have these conversations. It refuses to look at the way that the history of enslavement and its aftermath structure everything in this country. There's just no getting beyond it. And instead, this belief in innocence, as he said, that the innocence constitutes the crime. No one is innocent, right. So looking at these somewhat innocent children allowed him to kind of reflect on that. But it is also the case that he always, you know, he almost like, needed the experience of being a total outsider. He was comfortable in that, in a way, because that's how he felt growing up in Harlem. So he needed to reproduce these kinds of outsider experiences in different places to be creatively productive.

[Alison Stewart]

When he was in the Swiss Alps, he learned that Lucien was going to be a father. And he told Lucien he had to marry the woman.

[Nicholas Boggs]

That's right.

[Alison Stewart]

That was very important to him. Why was that important to James Baldwin?

[Nicholas Boggs]

Listen, Baldwin was a. Baldwin had a code. You know, he had a code in love. And it could be very hard on people. You know, I think it was. He could be very demanding, but I think because he grew up, quote, unquote, illegitimate, he had this sense, he said, well, listen, you have to marry her. You know, you have to. I think you might have come to regret that later on.

[Interviewer]

That's my next question.

[Nicholas Boggs]

But at the time, you know, that was how he felt. And. Yeah, I can take your next question then.

[Interviewer]

My next question. It's total speculation, and I realize, regardless.

[Alison Stewart]

Of the reason, but do you think.

[Interviewer]

He regretted sending Lucien to get married, to seek love, some sort of love elsewhere?

[Nicholas Boggs]

I think that's a very hard question to answer. He was pretty young back then, and Lucien was pretty young. And then, of course, they got together later and all kinds of times. But I will say this. What's complicated about Baldwin's psychological makeup? Like Many people's is that he kind of needed to have this intense love that he would lose and then yearn for from a distance and then get back sometimes only to lose again. This was very creatively productive. He went away to Yaddo. He went away to McDowell. He went away to these places yearning for Lucien, right? Often in the middle of a breakup. This was fuel for his art. Not just for him emotionally, but also the plots of his novels often reproduce these kinds of love triangles. So I'm not sure if that was the case way back then in that first moment when he married her. But I think he did subconsciously, perhaps recognize that this was a structure that worked for him as an artist.

[Interviewer]

Was Lucien aware that he might be hurting James Baldwin?

[Nicholas Boggs]

That's a good question.

[Interviewer]

I don't know if there's an answer to it, but I kept thinking it like, does he know?

[Nicholas Boggs]

Well, he was about 17 and 18 years old then, so you gotta remember that. I think the scholar Magdalena Zaborowska, who's written some really important books on Baldwin, especially about his Turkish years has a wonderful interview that she did with Lucien that she generously shared with me. And this was from 2010, when Lucienne died a couple years later. But it was very clear that he was ambivalent about. You know, he loved Baldwin, but he kind of almost resented that he had been positioned as his lover. Kind of said he, well, I wasn't that much of a lover. But then he kind of would backtrack on that and kind of liked the idea that he had saved him, but in other ways didn't. So I'm guessing that Lucien, throughout his life, had a sort of complicated relation to Baldwin. Listen, Baldwin was this huge figure. He became a celebrity. Baldwin became Lucienne's boss. I mean, he became. Lucien became his business manager. He was very dependent on Baldwin. So we have this complicated relationship that weaves in and out throughout their entire lives.

[Interviewer]

My guest is Nicholas Boggs. The name of the book is A Love Story. It's our choice for a full bio. When Go Tell it on the Mountain was released, it was interesting because some black writers had sharp words for Baldwin. Mainly, Langston Hughes is who I'm thinking of. Was there a generational difference between the two men? Was that the issue, or was it something else?

[Nicholas Boggs]

It's probably a lot of things, beginning with the fact that Knopf, which published Baldwin's novel, had just dropped Langston.

[Interviewer]

That too.

[Nicholas Boggs]

So, you know, that'll do it. Although that was. That was a bad idea on Knopf's. Part. But. And they had other bad ideas when they later rejected Giovanni's room. But I think there were a few things going on there. First of all, that was an era where you were only allowed to have one black writer, right? This ridiculous notion that there can only be one. So it was sort of Richard Wright, Langston Hughes maybe was in that conversation, but here comes Baldwin, right? So I think that was part of it. I also think that we can't know, but the fact that Baldwin had written this novel with this homosexual subtext, very clear homosexual subtext, when perhaps people have written Langston Hughes might have been closeted. What is this? How is this gonna make him feel like? What's that? That's gotta be a complex emotional thing going on there. I'll also say, though, that I think that some of Langston Hughes Hughes's comments were generous. He did write that Baldwin wrote like the sea, like undulates like the sea. And he wrote also that it seemed that Baldwin had not yet resolved his relationship to black America and white America. And I think that's kind of true. He was in the middle of doing that by moving to France. So complicated things going on there.

[Interviewer]

It's interesting because you note that Baldwin's writing was done mainly in Europe, and so he wasn't necessarily subject to American homophobia when he was writing. How are American novels dealing with gay characters and how are they different in Baldwin's novels?

[Nicholas Boggs]

Well, you have something like Truman Capote's Other Voices, Other Rooms. Wonderful, wonderful novel you have in Baldwin, though. It's set in France, right. It's taking this expatriate character, David, and it's fascinatingly, you know, looking at white American masculinity through this kind of transatlantic experience written by a black author, you know, which was shocking to people. Of course, they thought he was just going to go and write, you know, another go tell on the mountain. That's what they wanted him to do. So I think what was, you know, other than Truman Capote and a couple other people, you know, they were kind of pulpy gay novels and stuff. But the idea that it could be literature, right, was still kind of a new idea, which is why when it got reviewed, you know, Granville Hicks and others, they would. They would be heaping all this praise on it and they would say, he saves it from being a tawdry, tawdry subject matter. As if just the fact that it was same sex love made it tawdry. So that was interesting. Yeah, it sort of. It was so groundbreaking in so many different Ways.

[Interviewer]

Okay, James Baldwin could be charming, intelligent, thoughtful, but he could be a huge pain. He didn't handle money well. There's a story in your book where he stayed in an apartment of a friend in New York City and then left it in shambles. He left kind of a bad taste in the mouth of McDowell fellowships by, like, not paying his bills.

[Nicholas Boggs]

Yeah, Yaddo. Be clear. That was Yaddo. And I want to have a correction to the that. That was Bill Cole. Not a correction that you wouldn't know, but I actually just met somebody who'd stayed in Bill Cole's apartment where Baldwin had stayed and reportedly had left bedbugs and left it in shambles. This person told me when he stayed in Bill Cole's Greenwich Village apartment during that time, they were cockroaches. So. Just saying. So Bill Cole. Yeah, Bill Cole. I'm letting Baldwin off the hook on that one.

[Alison Stewart]

Well, he did leave these huge bills at Yaddo.

[Nicholas Boggs]

That is for sure. That is for sure.

[Alison Stewart]

So the big question is, why didn't he observe the practical nature of living an adult life?

[Nicholas Boggs]

Well, there's a story I'll go back to when he first got to Paris, and there was this kind of communist woman. They were all living in this sort of bohemian hotel, and she went off for vacation, and she had a typewriter, and he borrowed her typewriter, quote, unquote. And when she came back, you know, he wouldn't give it back to her because. And she said, well, why not? He was really testing her communist principles. And she said, because I'm writing with it. I have to write a novel. You're not a novelist. He did have. I mean, nothing came before that. Right. Nothing came before the art. So similarly, at Yaddo, he was in the middle of a breakup with Lucien. Most of those phone calls were back to Lucien or others talking about the breakup. But that's also where he had a breakthrough, where he realized that Giovanni's Room was not this little short story he was writing, but was this big novel. Okay, the Yaddo thing is complicated because, yes, that was a big phone bill, but to Yaddo's credit, they were one of the first artist residency to integrate. Right. Which was amazing. That doesn't mean it was all smooth. That doesn't mean they weren't still paying different kind of attention to the black artists who came there and having different kinds of expectations. The reality is that Baldwin was living by his wits and by his shoestring. He really did not have the money. And then when he. He Wanted to. He probably wanted to pay back. He definitely wanted to come back, but they wouldn't let him come back.

[Alison Stewart]

James Baldwin attempted suicide a few times. What was the source of his depression?

[Nicholas Boggs]

Well, what is the source ever of depression? Right. But I think for him, you know, I don't want to psychoanalyze him, but I do think, you know, he would probably say that this kind of double paternity that he was dealing with, right. He never knew his father and this was the one that he would never really write about or talk about. That was a kind of wound. And then of course, the wound of his stepfather who was so hard on him. So I think, you know, if we wanted to be sort of Freudian or something, we could go there. But I think the larger issue is more social. I mean, it's just the way that he grew up as a sensitive, brilliant black man in an America that did not want him and did not treat him correctly, did not understand the treasure that he is and that he was. You know, I also think there's a kind of just a melancholic temperament that he had. I also believe that he, that he had a calling as a writer that put him in really difficult situations. You know, Malcolm X is killed, Martin Luther King is killed, Medgar Evers. He felt he was next. That's immensely. That's pretty depressing. That's pretty stressful, you know. So I think that there were social forces that we have to deal with as well. We also lived in a time when he wasn't gonna go get like mental health care. So, you know, I think there were a lot of sources of it. What's amazing is how turned his suffering and he turned his challenging into such art. I think the interviewer asked him like, what did you do? You grew up black, poor and gay. And he said, I hit the jackpot. I mean, he was able to turn these so called negatives. Of course, these aren't negatives, but the society saw as negative into incredible positive in the sense that it gave him a perspective that nobody else had or was going to take advantage of the way that he did.

[Alison Stewart]

In section 2. Is there anything you wanted to point out before we go to section three, which you think is real important?

[Nicholas Boggs]

So there's this four part structure and in the middle is the interlude. In the interlude, two important things happen. He goes to Corsica and then when he comes back from Corsica, he goes to the south for the first time. South of America. Right. In Corsica is one of the times that he tries to kill himself. Okay. So no Baldwin scholar anybody had ever found the house where he stayed for seven crucial months when he was trying to work on another country and recover from all kinds of things. But my mother came with me to Corsica. So I got Bob Caro, the great biographer. I got a little fellowship, and I used that money to go to Corsica. And my mom and I found the address of the house where he stayed for those seven months. And this is where he actually, you know, he was going through a breakup with Arnold, and he. At night, he jumped over the terrace wall and went down to the water and thought of drowning himself, thought of Virginia Woolf, but didn't. But didn't do it. And Bob Carroll writes about the importance of turning every page. He writes about the importance of place going everywhere. So that's what I did. So I find the house with my mother. We knock on the door. It's hot, it's hot, hot, hot July. No one answers the door. So I decided, okay, well, let's walk down towards the water where he would have thought of drowning himself. We turn around and on the terrace that Baldwin would have jumped down from a woman's doing her laundry. And intrepid biographer that I am, what do I do? I jump behind a bush. But my mother goes, bonjour. And next thing you know, we are in the house. It's pretty much the same as it was when Baldwin lived there. We spend the whole day looking through old photographs, talking to people who lived there, who knew the people who lived there before. So it was just. I said to Bob Caro afterwards, I said, you were missing one important thing for the biographer. Always bring your mother. And it was from Corsica that he wrote this gorgeous letter to his own mother that is really important. So he spent seven months there, and he really was rejuvenated. This is when he found out that Giovanni's Room was a finalist for the National Book Award. It did not win, but it was a finalist. But then he really felt the pull of coming back and going south. So he wrote an article for Harper's and another publication, and he went down south and met Martin Luther King for the first time. Was sort of politically a political awakening for him. Spending some time in the church was really moving to him because he saw the church could be a kind of political community that he hadn't understood before. So that was. But it was also kind of devastating. Seeing. He wrote to Mary Painter about seeing burning crosses and having psychosomatic illness. When he arrived back at Grand Central Station, his suitcase burst at the seams and was kind of a metaphor. He was falling apart. So that's the end of the interlude.

[Alison Stewart]

That was Nicholas Boggs, the author of A Love Story. Tomorrow on Full bio, James Baldwin, the civil rights leader. This is all of it on wnyc. I'm Alison Stewart. I want to quickly preview some of the conversations we'll be having here on ALL of IT over the next couple of days. Tomorrow we will speak with former Shark Tank producer Jonathan Walton. After losing nearly $100,000 to a serial fraudster, he pivoted to making an investig podcast called Queen of the Con. Now he's published his first book, Anatomy of a con artist. The 14 red flags to Spot Scammers, Grifters and Thieves. He joins us to discuss and will speak with award winning filmmaker Sterlin Harjo. You may know him as the creator of the TV series Reservation Dogs. Now he has a new series and on Friday he will join us to discuss the Lowdown. It stars Ethan Hawke as an amateur sleuth who becomes obsessed with getting to the bottom of a mysterious death. Tulsa, that's in the future. Now let's get this hour started with the final chapter in this month's Full Bio conversation. Full Bio is our book series where we spend a few days with the author of a deeply researched biography to get a fuller understanding of the subject. Nicholas Boggs has written a 700 page biography of one of literature's giants and James Baldwin. It's called A Love Story. The book is full of detail from Baldwin's upbringing in New York City to his finding a home in Paris to finding a place to write in Turkey, all while holding different people close to his heart, his family, Buford Delaney, Lucien Hapsisberger, Engin Cesar and Euron Kazak. And as I said, the book is about 700 pages long. So we're just touching on a few highlights. Today we meet James Baldwin, the celebrity and the activist. Hollywood came calling for Baldwin, as did tv. He appeared on talk shows, famously showed up for William F. Buckley in a debate and had a long interview with Nikki Giovanni that showed his intellect and his generational leanings. Baldwin became a civil rights advocate. His writing about the south in the late 50s and early 60s painted a disturbing picture. Here he is on FRESH AIR explaining a bit about how it started long.

[James Baldwin]

Before that when I first got south, first went south and tried to begin to because I went as a reporter and I tried to get the story published, you know, the first few times I first few magazines when I came back did not want to publish the reports because they accused me of fomenting violence. Now I was describing violence which is not a violence which I was no way responsible. And I thought that people should know what is going on and why it's going on. And in the battle to do this, I became notorious. In any case, the battle I was fighting, it seemed to me, was not simply about black people, but also my position that concerns white America was, as your country too, it's your responsibility too. You know, and the Fire Next time is probably the culmination of all those years. You know, it was when I was being called the angry young man on the white side of town and being called Uncle Tom on the black side of town.

[Interviewer]

He met with Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, and the FBI kept the file on him.

[Alison Stewart]

For more, let's get into our full bio conversation with Nicholas Boggs, author of a love story.

[Interviewer]

About his time in Turkey. James Baldwin said, turkey saved my life. How so?

[Nicholas Boggs]

Well, Turkey saved his life because this was a moment when he was once again really, really down, really feeling like, you know, his love life was a mess. He didn't know what, you know, he's really struggling to write another country. I mean, really struggling. And so he had gone actually to Israel for a trip and decided to go to Turkey to follow his friend Engin Jazzar. Enginizar had played the role of Giovanni in an actor's studio rendition of the play a couple years earlier. This is 1961. He arrives there and there's just a party full of Turkish intellectuals and artists. They make their own vodka. You know, they're artists, they're singing Turkish work songs. Then he sings Negro spirituals. He falls asleep on the lap of some famous Turkish actress and he just feels reborn. And within a couple of weeks, he has written the End of Another Country. And that's when he actually meets David Leeming. And at that party. And so again, it was, as he would say, from another place, you can see America more clearly. And that's what he used it for. That is where he wrote the Fire Next Time. I mean, he was going back and forth. So as kind of scary and exhausting and exhilarating as the civil rights movement was, he would. Throughout that decade, he would return to Istanbul. He really considered it his home. And in the end, he ended up directing a play there in the late 60s starring engine, collaborating with this great friend of his we called his blood brother. He really wanted to do more in the theater. And he had just come back from Hollywood where he tried to make Malcolm X do that. That's A whole other crazy story.

[Interviewer]

Well, that's what my next question was. Like Hollywood came calling for James Baldwin. How did he react? How did he think about possibly writing a script about Malcolm X?

[Nicholas Boggs]

Well, he was devastated by Malcolm X's murder and he was very interested in being writing for the film. And he had all kinds of dreams that hadn't come to fruition already around that. But his brother David did say, don't go out there, they'll kill you. That's what he said to him. But out Baldwin went and he was working on it with Columbia Pictures, but he was also ping ponging back and forth to do political events with Martin Luther King. This was a very heady time. Then when he was working on it, he was very close with Billy Dee Williams. He wanted Billy Dee Williams. He sort of had a big crush on him. He wanted him to play Malcolm X. But Columbia wanted, unbelievably, Charlton Heston to play Malcolm X. And so this was, yeah, I'm sorry.

[Interviewer]

Making a terrible face. And you're all, everybody at home listening to this is making that same face.

[Nicholas Boggs]

Yeah, it's pretty, it's unbelievable. And then, then not then you realize actually this, what was going on out there, it's, it kind of makes sense. But Balbin wasn't going to let that happen. But he ended up so up distraught that he swallowed some sleeping pills. You know, he also got news of the murder of Martin Luther King while he was there. So a lot, a lot was going on. And he did attempt suicide, but fortunately he was able to have his stomach pumped. And then he said, I split to save my life. And that's when he went back to Turkey and kind of all that pent up frustrated energy from the screenplay he poured into directing Fortune in Men's Eyes with Engin and this troupe. And it was a sort of transformation, formative experience for him and for Turkish theater. It was a kind of a play, John Herbert's play about penitentiary. It's kind of a very complicated, I keep saying complicated, but it was play about sort of homosexuality and prisons and children and how boys are mismanaged by the state systems and all of that. So he did it and it was a humongous hit in this very socially conservative country. I mean it was a smash hit and I think it was one of the best experiences of his life. But after that it's almost like he had run its course. He'd had come to. It was sort of like his love affair with Istanbul had been consummated. And it kind of Left him empty, wondering, well, what's next?

[Interviewer]

He was a leading voice in the civil rights movement. What did he see as his role in the civil rights movement? Was he a communicator? What was it?

[Nicholas Boggs]

I would say, at least in the beginning, he was reluctant. He really saw himself as an artist. That's why he went to France. He wanted to write novels and plays. But he just, you know, after that visit south, he just understood that he had a responsibility. And Sterling Brown told him this and others, that he had a kind of unique position and that he. To not take advantage of that would be a loss for his people. So he saw himself, though, not as a spokesman, but as a witness. That's what he called himself. His job was to be a witness. So he went on the marches. He said he didn't like marches, but he went on the marches. But really, it was writing these speeches. He wasn't like Bayard Rustin, who was a brilliant grassroots organizer. That wasn't exactly what Baldwin did. Although Baldwin did do some grassroots organizing himself when his play blues for Mr. Charlie Got Canceled.

[Interviewer]

Oh, we gotta talk about that. All right. Blues for Mr. Charlie. It was on Broadway. The producers at first asked him to soften it.

[Nicholas Boggs]

Oh, yes, a bit.

[Interviewer]

What did they want changed?

[Nicholas Boggs]

Well, they thought that it was called blues for Mr. Charlie and Mr. Charlie is the name for kind of a racist white man. Just, you know, colloquially. Colloquially. And it was a play that was divided into Blacktown and Whitetown. And Baldwin was doing some really. Sort of influenced by Genet, he was doing some really interesting courtroom drama where he was kind of implicating the white audience members as members of a jury. I mean, he was kind of breaking that fourth wall. And they didn't like that. They didn't think that people would come out and watch it. They, you know, they also thought that Baldwin had his hand way too much in the production. In a sense, they had a point there. He wasn't the director, however, he knew that they wouldn't be able to do justice to what the police kind of political content. So that was like a very difficult chapter in his career and in his life. I think he was drinking a lot and maybe taking some other stuff to kind of get through. He was also going through a breakup with Lucien Lien, who was having an affair, ended up marrying Diana Sands. And so, you know, this was a hard, hard period.

[Alison Stewart]

But he fought back. He had this fundraiser because they were going to close the play.

[Nicholas Boggs]

They were going to close the play. And somebody said this to me, I won't name her, but she's somebody who blurred my book. She said that that was one of the funniest parts of the book to her. Because here Baldwin was acting like, you know, the closing of the play was the march on Washington, right? And he, like, got a pamphlet going and he got all his famous friends involved and he. It is kind of funny. Although, you know, the truth is Broadway was racist. He knew what he was, what he's contending with. I mean, you know, so eventually they did keep going. Some rich patrons gave some money and it kept going. And then he went to Istanbul and they kind of closed it behind his back. But he got the last word because he ended up lampooning Strasberg and the other folks involved in that in his next novel, Tell me how long the trade's been gone.

[Alison Stewart]

We're talking to Nicholas Boggs. The name of his book is A Love Story is our choice for full bio. I want to talk about the meeting with Attorney General Robert Kennedy. Sort of this famous, infamous meeting where Baldwin, along with Lena Horne, Lorraine Hansberry, Harry Belafonte, they met with Kennedy to discuss Robert race relations. And it's like they were speaking different languages, quite honestly. What was it that Baldwin wanted Kennedy to understand?

[Nicholas Boggs]

In Baldwin's words? He wanted Kennedy to take moral responsibility for the conduct of the country towards black Americans. That was the word moral. He really, really. And they refused to sort of say that. He wanted him to walk to into Birmingham with little girl when they got spat upon. Know what that felt like? See what that was like up close? Was he being a little bit rhetorical there? Of course. But you know what was fascinating to me now this. This is. This episode has been written about a lot. And. But what I tried to do by looking more closely, and again, it sort of has mythological proportions at this point, so it's hard to know what really happened. There are different. Different accounts by Kennedy, different accounts by Baldwin by Kenneth Clark, who was there. But Baldwin had met that same day with Louis Funke at the New York Times about blues for Mr. Charlie. And he'd sort of snuck into the end of the conversation that he was going to have this secret meeting with Kennedy. And Funky said, oh, that's a big news story. Can I tell somebody in the New York Times? He ended up telling someone named Leymond Robinson, who was one of the few black reporters at the Times. And the way that Baldwin, I think, very smartly. You know, I don't know this for sure, but this is my feeling that there was something very strategic about getting These big name people like Lena Horn and Harry Belafonte and leaking the fact that this was happening. He wasn't going to have some secret meeting with them and tell them how to handle what they were calling, quote, unquote, the Negro problem. Right. He had other ideas. He was going to. He was going to deal with the white problem, and he was going to bring his people to help do that. And so it became a kind of huge media circus, which is what he wanted, because eventually, I think that really did help lead to the Civil Rights Act. The President started using the word moral. Not long, not that long after that, he started hiring more African Americans in the government. So this was an example. You know, it's not the same as what he did with the pamphlets for blues for Mr. Charlie. But Baldwin was, you know, so when you say he was a witness, he was a witness, but. But he was also, I think, a very canny and strategic organizer in his own way.

[Interviewer]

The FBI was following him.

[Alison Stewart]

Was he aware?

[Nicholas Boggs]

Oh, yes, he was aware. He would joke about it on the phone. He'd say, well, you know, give my regards to J. Edgar when you try to reach me. You know, he was aware. And, you know, the FBI, you know, it was a terrible thing, obviously. But as a biographer, there were good things about it, which is that, you know, Baldwin lived this crazy, peripatetic, transatlantic life, and it'd be hard to keep track of where he was. The FBI knew exactly where he was. So the files, you know, I know when the plane landed, on what date?

[Alison Stewart]

That's so interesting.

[Nicholas Boggs]

So, yeah, they got a lot of things wrong, like, about him. Like, they thought he was married to his sister. For a while, they got the titles of novels incorrect, and they thought he was way more aligned with Elijah Muhammad than, in fact, he was. So, a lot. I mean, most things they got wrong. In fact, all they got right were kind of plain logistics, but those were helpful for me.

[Interviewer]

Jedvir Hoover was likely queer, right? How did that shape the way the FBI files read to you?

[Nicholas Boggs]

Well, there are many scholars who've written about it really productively. William J. Maxwell, he also compiled them into an edition. Maurice Wallace has written about it.

[Interviewer]

Beverly Page, we interviewed her for this.

[Nicholas Boggs]

Beverly Page, although she doesn't really write, I know much. Yep, she doesn't really. And that was interesting to me because I think. I think everybody has a point, but I think what she was sort of saying was that he didn't. He wouldn't have focused too much on Baldwin's sexuality because he wouldn't want it to come blow back on him.

[Interviewer]

Ah, interesting.

[Nicholas Boggs]

You know, but the fact of the matter is, the files themselves reflect something quite different. He says all the time, like, you know, is he a pervert? You know, he's this. That third. So, you know, he was definitely. Baldwin called hoover like the 20th century's greatest voyeur, something like that. I mean, so I think Hoover and others think that Hoover was kind of titillated by Baldwin in a certain sense.

[Interviewer]

He had such. Baldwin had such a great vocabulary, just like just his. The pull out of voyeur as a way to describe J. Edgar Hoover. It was. It was beautiful to listen to him talk.

[Nicholas Boggs]

Yes, indeed.

[Interviewer]

Part four of your book is a bit of a discovery for you. You entered the book a little bit. It's beautiful. On the desk in front of me, you have a copy of Little Man. Little man, which was described as a child story for adults, written by James Baldwin. Tell us the story of this. I don't even know what the question is to ask because there's so much that could be asked. But initially, tell me the origin of the book and then how you got involved.

[Nicholas Boggs]

So the origin of Little Man. Little Man.

[Interviewer]

First start with that.

[Nicholas Boggs]

Yes, sure. So Little Man. Little man was a children's book that he worked on with a French obscure French painter named Joran Kazak. The subject of the fourth part of the book in the early 1970s. And when it was written in black English, Baldwin called it a children's book for adults. It was really sort of just very subversive for its time. Baldwin wrote that important essay, if black English is in the language, then tell me what is. This was kind of putting that into practice. Right. For children. This was well before the era of Ebonics and the kinds of arguments that came up later. And it talks about the pleasures and the joys and the resiliences of these kids in Harlem, but also the dangers, drug addiction, police surveillance. So people didn't know what to do with it. And this was when Baldwin's reputation was sort of going on the decline. So it went out of print and it was totally forgotten until I was in college at Yale and I was taking a class on James Baldwin. We read everything he'd written except this children's book. So David Leeming's biography had just come out in 1994. He had a couple paragraphs about it and about yarn. Kazak, sort of unclear if they were friends or lovers. And so I wrote, like, the second email I ever wrote in my life was to David Leeming. And he wrote back. This is 1996. He wrote back very nicely. I never met Joran Kozak. I don't know anybody alive who did. And I believe he's dead as well. So the trail kind of went cold until seven years later. I'd moved to New York to get my PhD. I was completely broke. And I decided to send more emails to art historians in Paris saying, do you know anything about this obscure, deceased French painter? No answer. But I left my phone number. There were no cell phones yet. Weeks later, the phone rings in my studio apartment. This is Joran Kazzak calling from Paris. I'm alive. I have many stories to tell you about Jimmy. It's was 2003, so I signed up for my third credit card. I used all my dissertation funding. You know, my dissertation never became a book. It became, I guess, this book. And I went over to Paris and I interviewed him. And thank goodness, because he died just two years later of cancer. But I spent a whole summer interviewing him. His wife, Beatrice. He was an incredible man. And, yeah, that was the origins of this book, actually.

[Interviewer]

It's so interesting to think about. All these great biographies were written so long ago, but before the Internet, before we could have communication with one another. It almost seems like everybody's biography should be written again.

[Nicholas Boggs]

Yeah. You know what I mean?

[Interviewer]

Because they thought he was dead.

[Nicholas Boggs]

Yeah. I don't know how they did it. I mean, David Leeming's biography is a gift to humans.

[Interviewer]

It's a beautiful, beautiful book. But that's a serious. That's not serious. I mean, that's a big issue.

[Nicholas Boggs]

It is. He knew him personally, though, so that helps. Right. We can only know him virtually through the Internet.

[Interviewer]

We're getting towards the end of James.

[Alison Stewart]

Baldwin's life, and it appeared that James Baldwin, and please correct me if I'm wrong, is that he wrote about HIV and AIDS just once.

[Nicholas Boggs]

He only really wrote about it once. He spoke about it a couple more times.

[Alison Stewart]

I'm wondering back to our early. Earlier in our conversation, we talked about generational differences. Do you think that was part of it?

[Nicholas Boggs]

I do. Although, again, thanks to David Leeming, who shared with me an unpublished interview that one of Baldwin's last love interests, a younger black man named Shawn Henderson, interviewed him extensively and he asked him some questions about. About aids. So that's in the book. So there was an earlier interview with Richard Goldstein of the Village Voice where Baldwin sort of said that he didn't really know much about AIDS. This was in the 80s, mid-80s. He didn't know Much about or how it was trans transmitted or anything like that. But then this interview with Sean, which I think happened in like 86, a year before Baldwin died, or maybe even 87, the year that he died. He asked again, and Baldwin had more. More to say. And at this time, Baldwin had also been incorporating the historical reality of AIDS into his play the welcome Table. So I think it was very much actually on his mind at this point. But what he said was really interesting because he said all this hysteria around aids, as he put it, he said, obviously AIDS is something that we have to deal with. He's like, but it also is another opportunity for scapegoating of African Americans, scapegoating of gay people. He was saying, you know, this is another opportunity. You know, white America, basically dominant culture, thinks that this is never going to come for straight people. That, as he put it, gay people only have sex with gay people. Africans only have sex with Africans, Asians only have sex with Africans. This idea, this kind of ridiculous, again, innocence, right, that America has to disabuse himself of. And what he said, he said, it's going to be a chance where we're going to have to do what he always said. It's going to test love, it's going to require love. And of course, love is exactly what did not happen in the early AIDS era with Reagan and others. There was hatred, there was scapegoating. I mean, so he was very, I think, prescient and very right about what was happening and sort of the psychological and the psychopolitical dimensions of how HIV and AIDS was mobilized against communities of color and queer communities during that time period.

[Interviewer]

He died of stomach cancer. And, you know, I read several obituaries.

[Alison Stewart]

And they didn't seem like enough at the time.

[Interviewer]

How do you think his obituaries would be written today? What would be different about them?

[Nicholas Boggs]

Oh, what a great question. I've never had that question before. And who would write them? You know, one of my first jobs out of college was at the Washington Blade, and I wrote obituaries, so.

[Alison Stewart]

Oh, really?

[Nicholas Boggs]

Yeah. So I'm not saying I should write it. Definitely not. But I mean, Toni Morrison has such a beautiful eulogy for Baldwin that I almost feel like that should be his obituary. Yeah, I feel like a writer. You know, obituaries can be so dry. You know, much like biographies can sometimes be too dry. And I think if we thought of an obituary in a broader sense, in a bigger sense, in an artistic sense, what would it look like to think of Toni Morrison as her memorial being the obituary. But in terms of sort of assessing his legacy, I believe it would be completely different now. I mean, I think, you know, I don't remember what his obituary said, but it sort of was like, prominent, but it wasn't.

[Interviewer]

I was like, wa, wa, wa. It was a little.

[Nicholas Boggs]

You know, I think it. I think now it's fully understood in this country and across the world, you know, that he is one of, if not the most important writer of the 20th century. So I hope that that would be expressed fully in obituary today.

[Alison Stewart]

Is there anything I haven't asked you.

[Interviewer]

That you wanted to talk about?

[Nicholas Boggs]

Oh, gosh. When did you first encounter Baldwin?

[Interviewer]

In college. Yeah, in college.

[Nicholas Boggs]

Children's book. You found the children's book too, right?

[Interviewer]

No, in college I was an English and American lit major at Brown. And you were able to create your own concentrations. And so I did African American literature. But I did go pick up Giovanni's room in reading this because I read it so long ago. And I think I'll have a different reading of it once I get around to reading it, but it's sitting on my desk right now.

[Nicholas Boggs]

Terrific.

[Interviewer]

What has the response been to the book so far?

[Nicholas Boggs]

Overwhelming. I mean, really, I worked on it for so long and I didn't know I did it. It really is a labor of love. I mean, I worked on it for so long. Other projects that I put aside and debts I've gone into. But it's such an honor, I mean, to be able to write about. To write about him and to talk to all the people that I've met. I mean, Maureen Freeley, who knew him there. The Leemings have been so generous. You know, Baldwin family members like Aisha and Tijan who spoke to me about Little Man. Little man years ago. You know, people have been just so. Anybody who met him and knew him, you could just tell that there was this deep love. So it really felt right for it, for it to be a love story. So it really has kind of been a love fest since it came out. And I can't complain.

[Interviewer]

The name of the book is A Love Story. It is by Nicholas Boggs. It was our choice for full bio. Thank you for spending so much time with us.

[Nicholas Boggs]

Thank you so much.

[Alison Stewart]

That was Nicholas Boggs, the author of A Love Story. Nicholas will be on a panel at the Brooklyn book festival on September 21st at 5pm Full bio was engineered by Matt Mirando, post production by Jordan Lof, and written by me. The full full bio will be on.

[Multicare Announcer]

Our website this weekend for 140 years, MultiCare has been in Washington prioritizing long term solutions, partnering with local communities, and expanding access to care. Together, we're building a healthier future.

[Nicholas Boggs]

Learn [e-mail] suffering from dry, Tired, Irritated Eyes don't let dry eyes win. Use Sustain Pro. It hydrates, restores and protects dry eyes for up to 12 hours. Sustain Pro Triple Action Dry Eye Relief.