![]() ![]() David meets Giovanni in the café life of the Left Bank, and the two fall in love, spending days and nights in Giovanni’s one-room basement apartment. ![]() David, living in the south of France, recounts his last year in Paris after his girlfriend Hella has left for several weeks in Spain. Baldwin’s materials,” wrote New York Times critic Granville Hicks, “one rejoices in the skill with which he renders them.” Eventually, Dial Press published the book, and the critics praised it for its prose and its honesty. His editor at Knopf was eager for a second success by the young and talented “Negro writer.” But a novel set in Paris about the white American David who falls in love with an Italian named Giovanni was not the book they were expecting-or prepared to publish. His first, Go Tell It on the Mountain, was a success with readers and critics. WHEN James Baldwin presented a manuscript of Giovanni’s Room to his agent, Helen Strauss, she told him to burn it. ![]()
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