When James Baldwin, a senior in high school, walked into Beauford Delaney’s studio in Greenwich Village, it was the beginning of a lifelong friendship that would transform Baldwin’s way of seeing, and Delaney’s too. In this class, we will read the two key essays that Baldwin wrote about Delaney; we’ll learn something of the periods when they shared an apartment—first in the Village, later in Clamart, near Paris—and we’ll look closely at several of the huge number of portraits Delaney painted of Baldwin. This will allow us to delve into the complex reciprocity between their two visions of the world and of themselves. Theirs is a friendship that has also become a touchstone for a wide array of scholars, writers, and painters.

Rachel Cohen began writing about Beauford Delaney and James Baldwin more than twenty years ago, in her now-classic book A Chance Meeting: American Encounters, and she has recently written about the relationship again, from a new point of view, as part of the anthology Speculative Light: The Arts of Beauford Delaney and James Baldwin. 

Presenter

Rachel Cohen is the author of three books of nonfiction, most recently Austen Years: A Memoir in Five Novels, which was published in 2020 to critical acclaim. Her group biography, A Chance Meeting (2004), was re-released as a New York Review Classic in 2024 and was the inspiration for the Authors Guild Foundation’s inaugural literary seminar. Her essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The Guardian, The London Review of Books,and The New York Times, among other publications, and her work has been included in Best American Essays and Pushcart Prize anthologies. She is Professor of Practice in the Arts in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Chicago.

Few American writers have marked their era as powerfully as James Baldwin. As distinctive on the page as on the airwaves, his voice is indelibly associated with the demand for racial justice in the United States, a demand that continues to make him one of our most pressing and urgent contemporaries.

To mark Baldwin’s centenary, the Authors Guild Foundation invites you to join a conversation featuring some of our most exciting writers, scholars, and essayists as we gather to celebrate, study, and reflect on the legacy of Baldwin’s life and work.

The painting of James Baldwin in the graphic above is by Beauford Delaney and reprinted courtesy of the Michael Rosenfeld Gallery.

Beauford Delaney (1901–1979), James Baldwin, c.1945–50, oil on canvasboard, 24 x 18 inches / 61 x 45.7 cm, estate stamp; Private Collection; © Estate of Beauford Delaney, by permission of Derek L. Spratley, Esquire, Court Appointed Administrator, Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY