James Baldwin’s “children’s book for adults,” Little Man, Little Man: A Story of Childhood went quickly and quietly out of print when it was originally published by Dial Press back in 1976. In this talk, Nicholas Boggs discusses his rediscovery of the book over two decades ago at the Beinecke and its path to an acclaimed new edition published by Duke University Press in 2018. In the process, he provides an overview of the growth of the Baldwin archives in the Walter O. Evans Collection at the library and how they have been an essential source for his Baldwin biography in progress.
Nicholas Boggs is the co-editor, with Jennifer DeVere Brody of Stanford University, of James Baldwin’s Little Man, Little Man: A Story of Childhood (Duke, 2018). Currently a Walter O. Evans Fellow at the Beinecke and the Gilder Lehrman Center, he is at work on a Baldwin biography, to be published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, that has also been supported by an NEH Long-Term Fellowship at the Center for Research in the Humanities at the NYPL and a Leon Levy Center for Biography Fellowship.
Mondays at Beinecke online talks focus on materials from the collections and include an opening presentation at 4pm followed by conversation and question and answer beginning about 4:30pm until 5pm.
Zoom webinar registration: https://bit.ly/3ArgfhE