Baldwin's Harlem: A Biography of James Baldwin

Herb Boyd. Baldwin's Harlem: A Biography of James Baldwin New York: Atria BookS/ 2008 244 pp. $24.00.

African American Review, Volume 43, Numbers 2-3

© 2009 Douglas Field

Readers of James Baldwin's work have waited a long time for a major biography of the enigmatic wnter. Although there are a handful of useful phies, beginning with Fern Marja Eckman's The Passage of James Baldwin in 1966, and, more recently James Campbell's Talking at the Gates: A Life of James Baldwin (1991) and David Leeming's James Baldwin: A Biography (1994), there is no single work that compares detail or breadth to David Levering Lewis's magisterial biography Of W E. B. Du Bois or Arnold Rampersad's acclaimed work on Langsten Hughes. In Baldwin's Harlem A Biography of James Baldwin, Herb Boyd does not attempt to expand on earlier biographical accounts but instead focuses on the writer's relationship to Harlem, where Baldwin was born in 1924.

Boyd, a seasoned writer and managing editor of The Black World Today, has published eighteen books, including editing The Harlem Reader in 2003, a collection of stories and impressions from the Renaissance to the present. Although the publishers describe Baldwin's Harlem as "literary criticism," Boyd's book is rather a blend of cultural criticism and biography. While Boyd is clearly familiar with Baldwin's work, the strength of the book lies in the assured contextaalization of the writer's work, such as the chapters on the Harlem...