# The Saint-Paul-De-Vence House *A Biography of James Baldwin* — Legendary Biographies No. 052 - **Subject:** James Arthur Baldwin - **Written by:** Calvin Renard - **Shelf:** Letters & Ideas / Literature - **Published:** 2025 - **Extent:** 189 pages, 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink - **Paperback:** $19.99 — 6 × 9 in · 189 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · perfect-bound paperback - **Hardcover:** $24.99 — 6 × 9 in · 189 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · case laminate on the same text block - **EPUB:** $3.99 — EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books (ISBN 979-8-90470-035-5) - **Audiobook:** $5.99 — Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Imogen Vey (ISBN 979-8-90623-016-4) Buy it, or read the opening free: volumes/052-the-saint-paul-de-vence-house.html ## About this book He was fourteen when he climbed into the pulpit of a Harlem storefront church, and twenty-four when he boarded a one-way passage to Paris with forty dollars in his pocket. Between those two thresholds, and in the four decades that followed, James Baldwin became the most morally exacting witness American letters has ever produced — and the most surveilled. Calvin Renard follows Baldwin from the tenements of his stepfather's terrified faith through the cafés of Saint-Germain, from the bus stations of the segregated South to the talk-show studios where he sparred with Buckley and the FBI agents who logged his every movement across two continents. Here are the four landmark books written before he turned forty, and here too is the longer second life: the years when Black Power found him insufficient, when the white liberal press found him exhausted, when he kept writing anyway from a stone house in the south of France. Drawing on the Bureau file, the unpublished correspondence, and the testimony of those who loved and quarreled with him, Renard asks what it cost a man to be, simultaneously, a Black writer, a queer writer, an exile, and a believer who had stopped believing — and what it means that a country which could not hear him in 1968 has chosen, at last, to listen. A life of the witness, and of the country that required one. ## Contents 1. The Meeting 2. The Stepfather 3. The Boy Preacher 4. DeWitt Clinton 5. The Departure 6. Go Tell It on the Mountain 7. Giovanni's Room 8. Notes of a Native Son 9. The Return 10. The Fire Next Time 11. Birmingham, the March, Dallas 12. Another Country and Blues for Mister Charlie 13. Soul on Ice 14. The White Literary Establishment Turns 15. No Name in the Street and If Beale Street Could Talk 16. Turkey, France, the Wandering Years 17. Remember This House 18. December 1, 1987 ## Questions **Who is The Saint-Paul-De-Vence House about?** James Arthur Baldwin. The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case The Saint-Paul-De-Vence House — and the name goes on the line underneath. **Is this an authorised biography?** No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented. **Can I read some of it before buying?** Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 4,334 words of the book. **How long is it?** About 59,500 words, 18 chapters, 189 pages in the paperback. **What is the printed book like?** 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink, perfect-bound paperback, matte laminate. Every title in the series uses the same specification, so they line up on a shelf. ## The writer Calvin Renard is a Detroit-born jazz critic and biographer. He has spent over three decades documenting the musicians who shaped American sound from the bebop era through the 1980s soul-pop crossover, working closely with archival recordings and musicians' estates. His deeply researched biographies include The Saint-Paul-De-Vence House and The Twelve Adopted Children. Both books focus on the private lives, creative struggles, and enduring cultural legacies of legendary mid-century artists. He lives in Detroit, Michigan, where he hosts a weekly late-night jazz program on public radio and collects vintage vinyl records.