Typescript draft with holograph emendations, Giovanni’s Room

Baldwin’s tragic story of love between two men in postwar Paris was not the second novel his publisher was expecting. Knopf had hoped for something more like a sequel to Go Tell It on the Mountain. The publisher rejected Giovanni’s Room based on its “perversion,” maintaining that its publication “would do Baldwin harm.”

This page of the manuscript shows an early flashback scene where David, as a teenager, experiences his first romantic encounter with a boy—a friend named Joey. Baldwin rejects the editorial suggestion in the left margin to “cut” the entirety of the scene. At the third to last line, he intensifies it, adding: “we kissed, as it were, by accident, then…”