Giovanni's Room

About Giovanni's Room

James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room (1956) is a novella set in 1950s Paris following David, a young American man engaged to a woman named Hella, who falls into a passionate and ultimately tragic love affair with the Italian bartender Giovanni. When Hella returns from Spain and David chooses her over Giovanni, the consequences are catastrophic. Groundbreaking for its time in its frank treatment of homosexual desire without pathologizing it, the novel is Baldwin's great meditation on shame, cowardice, and the destruction wrought by the refusal to acknowledge who one is. An American classic of queer literature and expatriate fiction.