Giovanni's Room (Deluxe Edition) - (Vintage International) by James Baldwin (Paperback)

About the Book

1950's Paris. After a homosexual experience in adolescence, David represses the impulses he finds unacceptable. In Paris he has an affair with Hella Lincoln, and proposes marriage. She considers his proposal on a trip to Spain, David has an affair lasting several months with Giovanni, an Italian bartender. Still unable to reconcile homosexuality with the life he envisions for himself, David travels with Hella, but is discovered by her in a gay bar with a sailor as he struggles to accept himself.

Book Synopsis

A deluxe edition of James Baldwin's groundbreaking novel, with a new introduction by Kevin Young and special cover art designed by Baldwin's friend and contemporary Beauford Delaney

Giovanni's Room is set in the Paris of the 1950s, where a young American expatriate finds himself caught between his repressed desires and conventional morality. David has just proposed marriage to his American girlfriend, but while she is away on a trip he becomes involved in a doomed affair with a bartender named Giovanni. With sharp, probing insight, James Baldwin's classic narrative delves into the mystery of love and tells a deeply moving story that reveals the unspoken complexities of the human heart.

About the Author

JAMES BALDWIN (1924-1987) was a novelist, essayist, playwright, poet, and social critic. His first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, appeared in 1953 to excellent reviews, and his essay collections Notes of a Native Son and The Fire Next Time were best sellers that made him an influential figure in the growing civil rights movement. Baldwin spent much of his life in France, where he moved to escape the racism and homophobia of the United States. He died in France in 1987, a year after being made a Commander of the French Legion of Honor.