Description: Originally published: New York: Dial Press, 1956.
Review Quotes: "If Van Gogh was our 19th-century artist-saint, James Baldwin is our 20th-century one." --Michael Ondaatje
"Dazzling. . . . Giovanni's Room saved my life." --Garth Greenwell, Harper's"A young American involved with both a woman and a man. . . . Baldwin writes of these matters with unusual candor and yet with such dignity and intensity." --The New York Times "Absorbing . . . [with] immediate emotional impact." --The Washington Post
"Mr. Baldwin has taken a very special theme and treated it with great artistry and restraint." --Saturday Review "Exciting ... a book that belongs in the top rank of fiction." --The Atlantic
"Violent, excruciating beauty." --San Francisco Chronicle "To be James Baldwin is to touch on so many hidden places in Europe, America, the Negro, the white man --to be forced to understand so much." --Alfred Kazin "This author retains a place in an extremely select group; that composed of the few genuinely indispensable American writers." --Saturday Review "He has not himself lost access to the sources of his being --which is what makes him read and awaited by perhaps a wider range of people than any other major American writer." --The Nation "He is thought-provoking, tantalizing, irritating, abusing and amusing. And he uses words as the sea uses waves, to flow and beat, advance and retreat, rise and take a bow in disappearing . . . the thought becomes poetry and the poetry illuminates thought." --Langston Hughes "He has become one of the few writers of our time." --Norman Mailer