BALDWIN, James.

£3,000 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Giovanni's Room. First edition of the author's second novel, one of the most important and influential texts of 20th-century gay fiction. Knopf, the publishers of Baldwin's debut Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), turned down the manuscript of Giovanni's Room for its homosexual themes, which they feared would alienate Baldwin's existing readers. The novel was picked up by the Dial Press, with whom Baldwin published several of his later works.In an interview with Richard Goldstein, Baldwin described how he wrote Giovanni's Room "to clarify where I was in the world... If I hadn't written that book I would probably have had to stop writing altogether" (Baldwin & Trope, pp. 61-62).

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