Nicholas Boggs Receives Phi Beta Kappa’s 2026 Christian Gauss Award for “Baldwin: A Love Story”
WASHINGTON, DC – September 23, 2026 – The Phi Beta Kappa Society has awarded the 2026 Christian Gauss Award to “Baldwin: A Love Story” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2025), by Nicholas Boggs.
The Gauss Award honors outstanding books in literary scholarship or criticism. The Phi Beta Kappa Senate established the prize in 1954 in memory of Christian Gauss, the distinguished Princeton University scholar, teacher, and dean who also served as President of the Phi Beta Kappa Society. Literary biographies are eligible when they carry a predominantly critical emphasis.
The Society will present the award on September 29, 2026, at “Free Expressions: Academic Freedom and the Public Good,” a program that is part of Phi Beta Kappa’s 250th anniversary celebration, at the Chicago Cultural Center. The evening is the second of three events this year held in partnership with the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, bringing three of the nation’s oldest learned societies together to celebrate excellence and explore how knowledge strengthens an informed society. The series opened in April in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and concludes in November in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
From Farrar, Straus and Giroux: “‘Baldwin: A Love Story,” the first major biography of James Baldwin in three decades, reveals how profoundly the writer’s personal relationships shaped his life and work. Drawing on newly uncovered archival material and original research and interviews, this spellbinding book tells the overlapping stories of Baldwin’s most sustaining intimate and artistic relationships: with his mentor, the Black American painter Beauford Delaney; with his lover and muse, the Swiss painter Lucien Happersberger; and with his collaborators, the famed Turkish actor Engin Cezzar and the iconoclastic French artist Yoran Cazac, whose long-overlooked significance as Baldwin’s last great love is explored in these pages for the first time.
“Nicholas Boggs shows how Baldwin drew on all the complex forces within these relationships—geographical, cultural, political, artistic, and erotic—and alchemized them into novels, essays, and plays that speak truth to power and had an indelible impact on the civil rights movement and on Black and queer literary history. Richly immersive, “Baldwin: A Love Story” follows the writer’s creative journey between Harlem, Paris, Switzerland, the southern United States, Istanbul, Africa, the South of France, and beyond. In so doing, it magnifies our understanding of the public and private lives of one of the major literary figures of the twentieth century, whose contributions only continue to grow in influence.”
A New York Times– bestselling book, “Baldwin: A Love Story” has also won the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography, the Stonewall/Israel Fishman Nonfiction Award, the Randy Shilts Nonfiction Award, and the American Book Award. It was named a Top Ten Book of 2025 by Time magazine and The Atlantic, and a New York Times Notable Book.
Boggs is also the co-editor of Baldwin’s collaboration with Yoran Cazac, “Little Man, Little Man: A Story of Childhood” (Duke, 2018). His research and writing have been supported by fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Humanities Center, the Scholars in Residence Program at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and the Leon Levy Center for Biography, as well as a 2023 Whiting Creative Nonfiction grant. Educated at Yale and Columbia, he currently teaches at Stony Brook University and lives in New York City.
“James Baldwin believed that telling the truth clearly, forcefully, compellingly, and without any apology was a writer’s work and a citizen’s duty,” said Frederick M. Lawrence, Secretary and CEO of The Phi Beta Kappa Society. “Nicholas Boggs shows us a Baldwin we have not fully seen before, and he does it with the critical depth the Gauss Award exists to recognize. This is a Baldwin for our time. As we mark our 250th anniversary, there is no better book to honor on an evening devoted to free expression.”
The Chicago program features a keynote address and fireside conversation with Carla Hayden, who served as the 14th Librarian of Congress, along with award presentations from partner organizations. A cocktail reception follows the program.
The event takes place Tuesday, September 29, from 6:30 to 9:00 p.m. CT at the Chicago Cultural Center, 78 East Washington Street. Doors open at 6:00 p.m. Learn more and register at Eventbrite.
For more information on Phi Beta Kappa’s awards and programs, visit pbk.org or contact the Development, Events, & Awards Department at awards@pbk.org.
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About The Phi Beta Kappa Society
Phi Beta Kappa is the nation’s premier honor society, championing education in the arts and sciences for 250 years. We build a community where members can engage with peers and maintain their love of learning, and we use our platform to advocate for the arts and sciences, promoting their integral role in our communities, democracy, and institutions across the country.
We have chapters at more than 290 colleges and universities, nearly 50 associations and more than 700,000 members worldwide, including 17 U.S. presidents, 42 U.S. Supreme Court justices and more than 150 Nobel laureates. Our members apply their arts and sciences education to defy expectations and address society’s greatest challenges.
As we celebrate our 250th anniversary, we’re proud to be a place where knowledge inspires action. Visit www.pbk.org to join us in amplifying the power of knowledge and to build a thriving future of opportunity.