Giovanni's Room

First UK edition. Crown 8vo. Pp. 221, [3, blank]. Brown cloth, lettered and ruled in cream and yellow to spine. Wrapper design by William Belcher (15s net to front flap).

Offsetting to endpapers, dusted top edge, 1cm closed tear to upper dustwrapper panel, spine tips and folds edge-worn, else Very Good.

Author's second novel and a seminal work of gay fiction. Nominated for the 1957 National Book Award. Set in the bohemian world of 1950s Paris, it recounts an American expatriate's awakening to his true sexual nature, following the tragic resolution of a fated love triangle. By featuring a cast of all-white characters, Baldwin here gave notice that he was going to go his own way, and not conform to the expectation that all of his books would be about the "African American experience."

Knopf's editors, however, unanimously rejected the manuscript with the excuse that Baldwin wasn't "writing about the same things and in the same manner as [he was] before," and any publication therefore "will set the wrong kind of cachet on [his] writing and estrange many of [his] readers." They went on to say that the book was turned down "not because of its subject but because of its failure." So, frank discussion of homosexuality was not the issue, but simply "Giovanni's despair never [being] made real" in the book, plus the "girl's amusing candor [being] little better than a prop."

Nonetheless, in a 1984 interview with Richard Goldstein published in The Village Voice, the author declared that Giovanni's Room was a book he had to write in order "to clarify something for myself." Specifically, "the question of human affection, of integrity, in my case, the question of trying to become a writer, are all linked with the question of sexuality." The novel was subsequently brought out by the Dial Press in the U.S., and Michael Joseph in the U.K. "[A] book that belongs in the top rank of fiction." –The Atlantic

[John 'Henry' Carlisle, "Rejection Letter of James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room from Knopf Publishing Co.," Hidden Histories UT-Austin]