NEW YORK TIMES
BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER •
TIME’S
TEN BEST NONFICTION BOOKS OF THE DECADE • ONE OF THE
NEW YORK TIMES’S
FIVE BEST BOOKS OF THE 21ST CENTURY
“A brilliant and stirring epic . . . Ms. Wilkerson does for the Great Migration what John Steinbeck did for the Okies in his fiction masterpiece,
The Grapes of Wrath
; she humanizes history, giving it emotional and psychological depth.”—John Stauffer,
The Wall Street Journal
“What she’s done with these oral histories is stow memory in amber.”—Lynell George,
Los Angeles Times
WINNER: The Mark Lynton History Prize • The Anisfield-Wolf Award for Nonfiction • The
Chicago Tribune
Heartland Prize • The Hurston-Wright Award for Nonfiction • The Hillman Prize for Book Journalism • NAACP Image Award for Best Literary Debut • Stephen Ambrose Oral History Prize
FINALIST: The PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction • Dayton Literary Peace Prize
ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR:
The New York Times
•
USA Today
Publishers Weekly
O: The Oprah Magazine
Salon
Newsday
The Daily Beast
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR:
The New Yorker
The Washington Post
The Economist
Boston Globe
San Francisco Chronicle
Entertainment Weekly
Philadelphia Inquirer
The Guardian
The Seattle Times
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
The Christian Science Monitor
In this beautifully written masterwork, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Isabel Wilkerson presents a definitive and dramatic account of one of the great untold stories of American history: the Great Migration of six million Black citizens who fled the South for the North and West in search of a better life, from World War I to 1970.
Wilkerson tells this interwoven story through the lives of three unforgettable protagonists: Ida Mae Gladney, a sharecropper’s wife, who in 1937 fled Mississippi for Chicago; sharp and quick-tempered George Starling, who in 1945 fled Florida for Harlem, and Robert Foster, a surgeon who left Louisiana in 1953 in hopes of making it in California.
Wilkerson brilliantly captures their first treacherous cross-country journeys by car and train and their new lives in colonies in the New World.
The Warmth of Other Suns
is a bold, remarkable, and riveting work, a superb account of an “unrecognized immigration” within our own land. Through the breadth of its narrative, the beauty of the writing, the depth of its research, and the fullness of the people and lives portrayed herein, this book is a modern classic.