Hardbacks

This remarkable book covers a major shift in American life over the course of the twentieth century through the intimate and moving stories of three people who decided to leave the South to make new lives in the cities of the North and West. In a narrative of remarkable sweep and scope, Wilkerson traces their lives from difficult beginnings in the South, to their critical decisions to leave behind all they know and look for a better life in Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles. Three people–Ida Mae, George, and Robert–and their families serve as poignant and unforgettable representatives for the larger story of black migration in post-World War I America. More than a decade in the writing and research, and drawing on a huge range of interviews and archival materials, this book will stand as a classic of narrative journalism and of modern American history, on a par with works by Diane McWhorter, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Robert Caro, J. Anthony Lukas, and Taylor Branch.

Isabel Wilkerson, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Humanities Medal, is the author of the critically acclaimed New York Times bestseller The Warmth of Other Suns, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction and was named to Time’s 10 Best Nonfiction Books of the 2010s and The New York Times Magazine’s list of the best nonfiction books of all time. She has taught at Princeton, Emory, and Boston Universities and has lectured at more than two hundred other colleges and universities across the United States and in Europe and Asia.