Amazing Grace: A Life of Beauford Delaney

Described by those who knew him best as a Buddha, a Merlin, and “a cross between Brer Rabbit and St. Francis of Assisi,” the artist Beauford Delaney was anything but ordinary.

James Baldwin, his closest friend, wrote that “He has been starving and working all of his life–in Tennessee, in Boston, in New York, and now in Paris.He has been menaced more than any other man I know by his social circumstances and also by all the emotional and psychological stratagems he has been forced to use to survive; and, more than any other man I know, he has transcended both the inner and the outer darkness.” Indeed, these themes–grinding poverty, excruciating psychological torment, and the transcendence of inner and outer darkness through the light of his art–give shape and drama to Beauford Delaney’s most extraordinary life.

In Amazing Grace: A Biography of Beauford Delaney David Leeming, author of the acclaimed life of James Baldwin, tells the story of one of the most important black artists of our time with an affection, tact, and insight all too rare in recent biography. In chronicling Delaney’s remarkable trajectory from a strong religious family in Knoxville to his death in an Parisian insane asylum, Leeming maintains a dual focus on Delaney’s troubled inner life–his complicated homosexuality and the “voices” that would drive him mad–and his vibrant external life–his friendships with an amazing range of writers, artists, and musicians. 

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Hardcover, Letterform Archive, 2024
292 p, 9 × 12 in.