A review by bookappetit
James Baldwin: Early Novels & Stories by James Baldwin

5.0

Giovanni’s Room is not a gay love story. This is not about being a Black man in America. This book is about a man deeply distraught over his own sexuality. It’s easy to dislike David, our main character, but Baldwin writes him in a way that makes him so human, so relatable. This book covers themes of family, class, prejudice and internalized homophobia. In 1956, when this book was first published, Baldwin took this book to publishers and got rejected. They told him that he would lose his readers because he wrote about being Black, particularly being Black in America. But Baldwin said “the sexual-moral light was a hard thing to deal with. I could not handle both propositions in the same book. There was no room for it.” He even took America out of the equation and set the book in Paris. With everything that has come to light about the wage disparities between authors of color and white authors, I really hope a change is coming. And that Black people can write about whatever the heckity heck they want.