Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin

Portrait of James Baldwin by Beauford Delaney, 1945

Giovanni’s Room (1956)

James Baldwin (1924-1987) was an African American novelist, essayist, playwright, social critic, and poet. He was born in Harlem, New York City, in 1924. As a teenager and young man, he frequented the bars and cafes of Harlem and Greenwich Village, where he met poet Countee Cullen and artist Beauford Delaney, among other writers and artists of the Harlem Renaissance. Disgusted by the racism he encountered everywhere he went and grappling with being queer, in 1948 he left New York for Paris, where he lived for many years before returning to the U.S. to become a major voice in the Civil Rights Movement. Dispirited by the ongoing racism in the U.S., he once again became an expatriate, arriving in Istanbul, Turkey, in 1961 before eventually returning to France, living out his last years in the southern provinces.

Take a look at this 4 1/2-minute trailer for a documentary about Baldwin called The Price of the Ticket:

Excerpt from The Price of the Ticket

Here are a few excerpts from an interview done with Baldwin in The Paris Review in 1984:

Baldwin Interview

Check out this article on Baldwin’s Paris:

NY Times article by Ellery Washington on Baldwin’s Paris

About two-thirds of the way through this article, there’s a great map of Baldwin’s Paris, with all the neighborhoods mentioned in Giovanni’s Room, plus the cafes where Baldwin spent his time with other writers and artists.

Here’s a map of Paris neighborhoods, also found on the Literary Form page. Several of these neighborhoods appear in Giovanni’s Room: