Reading Order
Giovanni's Room Reading Order
Giovanni's Room (1956) by James Baldwin is his second novel and one of the most formally accomplished short novels in American literature — a novel about David, a young American man in Paris who is engaged to his American girlfriend Hella but who falls in love with Giovanni, an Italian bartender, and who cannot acknowledge what he feels or who he is. The novel is narrated by David looking back, from the night Giovanni is to be executed (for the murder of a predatory older man who was his employer and sometimes lover), at the choices he made that destroyed Giovanni and that may have destroyed himself. It is a novel of terrible beauty about shame, self-deception, cowardice, and the cost of refusing to become who you are. Giovanni's Room is remarkable for what it was when it was written: a novel by a Black American writer in which the protagonist is white, the setting is Paris, and the explicit subject is gay love and gay shame at a time when both were unpublishable by mainstream American publishers. Baldwin's publisher wanted him not to publish it; it was rejected by several publishers before Dial Press accepted it. The decision to make David white rather than Black has been read both as a protective move (distancing the racial question from the homosexual question) and as a deliberate formal choice (showing that the forms of self-deception Baldwin is writing about are not racially specific). Giovanni's Room is one of the essential gay novels of the 20th century and one of Baldwin's most formally perfect books.
Where to start
Giovanni's Room — any Vintage paperback. Short, reads in a single sitting, and stands completely alone; no prior Baldwin knowledge required. Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953) is the essential companion in his fiction.
Complete Giovanni's Room Book List
- 1Buy
Giovanni's Room
James Baldwin·1956·The novel — David's love for Giovanni in Paris and his refusal to acknowledge it; the execution, the shame, the self-deception; one of the essential gay novels of the 20th century and Baldwin's most formally perfect book; the white protagonist in Paris is the deliberate distancing of racial from homosexual questions. - 2Buy
Go Tell It on the Mountain
James Baldwin·1953·Baldwin's debut novel — the essential companion in his fiction; John Grimes's Harlem church and his crisis of identity is the companion in a Black American setting to David's Paris crisis; the definitive Baldwin entry point for most readers. - 3Buy
Another Country
James Baldwin·1962·Baldwin's third novel — the companion in his fiction; where Giovanni's Room is contained and formally perfect, Another Country is sprawling and epic; the explicit treatment of interracial and homosexual relationships in New York is the companion in the American setting. - 4Buy
The Fire Next Time
James Baldwin·1963·Baldwin's essential essay — the companion in his nonfiction; the two essays in The Fire Next Time show Baldwin's voice in its most direct and prophetic mode; essential reading alongside the fiction. - 5Buy
Maurice
E.M. Forster·1971·Forster's posthumously published novel about a gay man in Edwardian England — the companion in 20th-century literature about a man who must choose between his sexuality and his social world; where David chooses social acceptability and destroys Giovanni, Maurice chooses love and chooses himself. - 6Buy
Call Me By Your Name
André Aciman·2007·Aciman's novel about a summer love affair in Italy — the companion in literary fiction about a young man's first homosexual love in a European setting; where Baldwin writes about shame and refusal, Aciman writes about memory and acceptance. - 7Buy
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Oscar Wilde·1890·Wilde's novel — the companion in literary fiction about desire, beauty, corruption, and the cost of living a double life; Lord Henry and Dorian's relationship is the companion in the European literary tradition to David and Giovanni's. - 8Buy
A Separate Peace
John Knowles·1959·Knowles's novel about two boys at a New England boarding school — the companion in American fiction about male intimacy, jealousy, and the refusal to acknowledge what one feels; Gene's relationship with Finny is the American companion to David's relationship with Giovanni.
Giovanni's Room — Frequently Asked Questions
What is Giovanni's Room about?
Giovanni's Room is narrated by David, a young American man in Paris, on the night Giovanni is to be guillotined. Looking back, David recounts the choices that led to this moment: his engagement to Hella, his American girlfriend who has gone to Spain; his meeting with Giovanni, an Italian bartender working at a gay bar; their affair and their time together in Giovanni's small, disordered room; David's growing terror of what he feels and who he is; his abandonment of Giovanni when Hella returns; Giovanni's descent, after losing his job, into the world of the older man who has been pursuing him, and his eventual murder of that man. David narrates all of this with the formal, anguished prose of a man who cannot escape what he chose and what he refused to choose.
Why did Baldwin make David white?
The decision to make David white has been extensively discussed. Baldwin's publisher urged him not to publish Giovanni's Room at all, arguing that a Black writer writing about homosexual love would be professionally destroyed. Baldwin has said various things about the choice of a white protagonist at different times. One reading is protective: by separating the racial question from the homosexual question, Baldwin could treat the latter without the former; a Black protagonist would have made the novel unreadable to most editors and critics of the time. Another reading is that the choice was deliberate and meaningful: Baldwin is showing that the forms of self-deception and cowardice he is writing about are not racially specific — that shame and the refusal to become who you are afflict all kinds of men in all kinds of settings.
What is the significance of Giovanni's room itself?
Giovanni's room — the tiny, disordered room above the courtyard where David and Giovanni live together briefly — is one of the great symbolic spaces in American fiction. Baldwin describes it at the beginning and revisits it throughout: a room full of Giovanni's belongings, disordered, cramped, but a space that belongs entirely to Giovanni and in which David is sheltered. The room is the space of their love and also the space of David's terror — the place he has to leave because he cannot acknowledge what it means that he is there. After Giovanni's death, the room is emptied and whitewashed, and the image of that whitewashing — of everything being covered over — is the novel's final image of what David has done to Giovanni and to himself.
Is Giovanni's Room a gay novel?
Giovanni's Room is a novel about homosexual love and homosexual shame, and it is one of the essential novels in the tradition of gay literature. But to call it simply a 'gay novel' is to miss what Baldwin is doing: he is writing about the human cost of self-deception and cowardice, about what happens to people who refuse to become who they are, about the way shame destroys not only oneself but everyone one loves. These are universal themes — Baldwin is explicit about this — and the homosexual subject is the specific form they take in the novel. Baldwin resisted the categorization of Giovanni's Room as primarily a 'gay novel' because he thought it limited the novel's larger reach.
What should I read after Giovanni's Room?
After Giovanni's Room, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953) is Baldwin's debut and his most celebrated novel. Another Country (1962) is the companion in his fiction. For gay literature in the same tradition, E.M. Forster's Maurice and Edmund White's A Boy's Own Story are important companions. For the Paris expatriate literary tradition Baldwin is writing from, Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises and Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer are the American companions.
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