Amy J. Elias is Chancellor’s Professor and Director of the Denbo Center for Humanities and the Arts at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She is the author of
In this chapter, Nicholas Boggs responds to the gap in the scholarly engagement with James Baldwin’s Little Man, Little Man: A Story of Childhood, the 1976 genre-bending “child’s story for adults,” by digging deeper into the influence of two essential figures in the book’s overlooked history: Baldwin’s mentor Beauford Delaney, to whom it was dedicated, and the French artist Yoran Cazac, who provided its illustrations. Drawing on original research, the essay shows how Little Man, Little Man should be read as a particularly productive confluence of the artistic sensibilities of all three men, with roots in the time they spent together at Delaney’s studio on the outskirts of Paris more than a decade and a half before the book’s publication. Little Man, Little Man weds Baldwin’s political vision and linguistic virtuosity with the imprint of Delaney’s influence and refracts this union through Cazac’s dreamy watercolor illustrations.
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