Fear, queer love and self-loathing: James Baldwin’s mid-century masterpiece, Giovanni’s Room

American Writer James Baldwin in Paris. Photo by Sophie Bassouls Sygma via Getty Images by Dan Dixon, University of Sydney Our cultural touchstones series looks at influential books. Despite publishing James Baldwin’s first novel, Go Tell it on the Mountain, publishing house Alfred A. Knopf rejected his second. Upon receiving the manuscript of Giovanni’s Room in 1955, editor Henry Carlisle pronounced it a failure, telling Baldwin the novel, if published, would damage the author’s reputation. While Carlisle insisted the rejection had nothing to do with the book’s content, Baldwin was convinced otherwise. Knopf, he thought, did not want a story of homosexual love between a White American expat living in Paris and an Italian bartender being told by a Black man from Harlem. When Giovanni’s Room was finally published by the Dial Press in 1956, reception was mixed. The novel was critiqued both for its queerness, and for not, as was expected from Baldwin, focusing explicitly on the struggle of Black America. Critic Hilton Als has characterized the insipid response as follows: The dirt and sex you wrote about in ‘Go Tell It on the Mountain,’ and some of the essays. Can you forgo your imagination and be Black for...