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Conversations with James Ellroy (Literary Conversations Series)
Par Steven Powell. 2012
As a novelist who has spent years crafting and refining his intense and oft outrageous “Demon Dog of American Crime…
Fiction” persona, James Ellroy has used interviews as a means of shaping narratives outside of his novels. Conversations with James Ellroy covers a series of interviews given by Ellroy from 1984 to 2010, in which Ellroy discusses his literary contribution and his public and private image. Born Lee Earle Ellroy in 1948, James Ellroy is one of the most critically acclaimed and controversial contemporary writers of crime and historical fiction. Ellroy's complex narratives, which merge history and fiction, have pushed the boundaries of the crime fiction genre: American Tabloid, a revisionist look at the Kennedy era, was Time magazine's Novel of the Year 1995, and his novels L.A. Confidential and The Black Dahlia were adapted into films. Much of Ellroy's remarkable life story has served as the template for the personal obsessions that dominate his writing. From the brutal, unsolved murder of his mother to his descent into alcohol and drug abuse, his sexual voyeurism, and his stints at the Los Angeles County Jail, Ellroy has lived through a series of hellish experiences that few other writers could claim. In Conversations with James Ellroy, the author talks extensively about his life, his literary influences, his persona, and his attitudes towards politics and religion. In interviews with fellow crime writers Craig McDonald, David Peace, and others, including several previously unpublished interviews, Ellroy is at turns charismatic and eloquent, combative and enigmatic.The Francophone Caribbean boasts a trove of literary gems. Distinguished by innovative, elegant writing and thought-provoking questions of history and…
identity, this exciting body of work demands scholarly attention. Its authors treat the traumatic legacies of shared and personal histories pervading Caribbean experience in striking ways, delineating a path towards reconciliation and healing. The creation of diverse personal narratives—encompassing autobiography, autofiction (heavily autobiographical fiction), travel writing, and reflective essay—remains characteristic of many Caribbean writers and offers poignant illustrations of the complex interchange between shared and personal pasts and how they affect individual lives. Through their historically informed autobiography, the authors in this study—Maryse Condé, Gisèle Pineau, Patrick Chamoiseau, Edwidge Danticat, and Dany Laferrière—offer compelling insights into confronting, coming to terms with, and reconciling their past. The employment of personal narratives as the vehicle to carry out this investigation points to a tension evident in these writers’ reflections, which constantly move between the collective and the personal. As an inescapably complex network, their past extends beyond the notion of a single, private life. These contemporary authors from Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Haiti intertwine their personal memories with reflections on the histories of their homelands and on the European and North American countries they adopt through choice or necessity. They reveal a multitude of deep connections that illuminate distinct Francophone Caribbean experiences.Conversations with Barry Hannah (Literary Conversations Series)
Par James G. Thomas Jr.. 2016
Between 1972 and 2001, Barry Hannah (1942–2010) published eight novels and four collections of short stories. A master of short…
fiction, Hannah is considered by many to be one of the most important writers of modern American literature. His writing is often praised more for its unflinching use of language, rich metaphors, and tragically damaged characters than for plot. “I am doomed to be a lengthy fragmentist,” he once claimed. “In my thoughts, I don't ever come on to plot in a straightforward way.” Conversations with Barry Hannah collects interviews published between 1980 and 2010. Within them Hannah engages interviewers in discussions on war and violence, masculinity, religious faith, abandoned and unfinished writing projects, the modern South and his time spent away from it, the South's obsession with defeat, the value of teaching writing, and post-Faulknerian literature. Despite his rejection of the label “southern writer,” Hannah's work has often been compared to that of fellow Mississippian William Faulkner, particularly for each author's use of dark humor and the Southern Gothic tradition in their work. Notwithstanding these comparisons, Hannah's voice is distinctly and undeniably his own, a linguistic tour de force.Winner of the Children’s Literature Association’s 2014 Honor Book AwardCrockett Johnson (born David Johnson Leisk, 1906–1975) and Ruth Krauss (1901–1993)…
were a husband-and-wife team that created such popular children's books as The Carrot Seed and How to Make an Earthquake. Separately, Johnson created the enduring children's classic Harold and the Purple Crayon and the groundbreaking comic strip Barnaby. Krauss wrote over a dozen children's books illustrated by others, and pioneered the use of spontaneous, loose-tongued kids in children's literature. Together, Johnson and Krauss's style—whimsical writing, clear and minimalist drawing, and a child's point-of-view—is among the most revered and influential in children's literature and cartooning, inspiring the work of Maurice Sendak, Charles M. Schulz, Chris Van Allsburg, and Jon Scieszka. This critical biography examines their lives and careers, including their separate achievements when not collaborating. Using correspondence, sketches, contemporary newspaper and magazine accounts, archived and personal interviews, author Philip Nel draws a compelling portrait of a couple whose output encompassed children's literature, comics, graphic design, and the fine arts. Their mentorship of now-famous illustrator Maurice Sendak (Where the Wild Things Are) is examined at length, as is the couple's appeal to adult contemporaries such as Duke Ellington and Dorothy Parker. Defiantly leftist in an era of McCarthyism and Cold War paranoia, Johnson and Krauss risked collaborations that often contained subtly rendered liberal themes. Indeed, they were under FBI surveillance for years. Their legacy of considerable success invites readers to dream and to imagine, drawing paths that take them anywhere they want to go.Conversations with Joan Didion (Literary Conversations Series)
Par Scott F. Parker. 2018
Joan Didion (b. 1934) is an American icon. Her essays, particularly those in Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album,…
have resonated in American culture to a degree unmatched over the past half century. Two generations of writers have taken her as the measure of what it means to write personal essays. No one writes about California, the sixties, media narratives, cultural mythology, or migraines without taking Didion into account. She has also written five novels; several screenplays with her husband, John Gregory Dunne; and three late-in-life memoirs, including The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights, which have brought her a new wave of renown.Conversations with Joan Didion features seventeen interviews with the author, spanning decades, continents, and genres. Didion reflects on her childhood in Sacramento; her time at Berkeley (both as a student and later as a visiting professor), in New York, and in Hollywood; her marriage to Dunne; and of course her writing. Didion describes her methods of writing, the ways in which the various genres she has worked in inform one another, and the concerns that have motivated her to write.Conversations with Ron Rash (Literary Conversations Series)
Par Mae Miller Claxton and Rain Newcomb. 2016
Since the publication of Serena in 2008 earned him a nomination for the PEN/Faulkner fiction prize, Ron Rash (b. 1953)…
has gained attention as one of the South's finest writers. Rash draws upon his family's history in Appalachia, where most members have worked with their hands as farmers or millworkers. In the Grit Lit or Rough South genre, Rash maintains a prominent place as a skilled craftsman and triple threat, publishing four collections of poetry, six short story collections, and six novels. Though best known as an Appalachian writer, Rash's reach has grown to extend well beyond Appalachia and the American South, spreading to an international audience. Conversations with Ron Rash collects twenty-two interviews with the award-winning author and provides a look into Rash's writing career from his first collection of short stories, The Night the New Jesus Fell to Earth in 1994 through his 2015 novel, Above the Waterfall. The collection includes four interviews from outside the United States, two of which appear in English for the first time. Spanning sixteen years, these interviews demonstrate the disciplined writing process of an expert writer, Rash's views of literature on a local and a global scale, his profound respect for the craft of the written word, and his ongoing goal to connect with his readers.Hazel Brannon Smith: The Female Crusading Scalawag
Par Jeffery B. Howell. 2017
Hazel Brannon Smith (1914-1994) stood out as a prominent white newspaper owner in Mississippi before, during, and after the civil…
rights movement. As early as the mid-1940s, she earned state and national headlines by fighting bootleggers and corrupt politicians. Her career was marked by a progressive ethic, and she wrote almost fifty years of columns with the goal of promoting the health of her community.In the first half of her career, she strongly supported Jim Crow segregation. Yet, in the 1950s, she refused to back the economic intimidation and covert violence of groups such as the Citizens" Council. The subsequent backlash led her to being deemed a social pariah, and the economic pressure bankrupted her once-flourishing newspaper empire in Holmes County. Rejected by the white establishment, she became an ally of the black struggle for social justice.Smith's biography reveals how many historians have miscast white moderates of this period. Her peers considered her a liberal, but her actions revealed the firm limits of white activism in the rural South during the civil rights era. While historians have shown that the civil rights movement emerged mostly from the grass roots, Smith's trajectory was decidedly different. She never fully escaped her white paternalistic sentiments, yet during the 1950s and 1960s she spoke out consistently against racial extremism. This book complicates the narrative of the white media and business people responding to the movement's challenging call for racial justice.Conversations with Michael Chabon (Literary Conversations Series)
Par Brannon Costello. 2015
Since the publication of his first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, launched him to fame, Michael Chabon (b. 1963) has…
become one of contemporary literature's most acclaimed novelists by pursuing his singular vision across all boundaries of genre and medium. A firm believer that reading even the most challenging literature should be a fundamentally pleasurable experience, Chabon has produced an astonishingly diverse body of work that includes detective novels, weird tales of horror, alternate history science fiction, and rollicking chronicles of swashbuckling adventure alongside tender coming-of-age stories, sprawling social novels, and narratives of intense introspection. Uniting them all is Chabon's utterly distinct prose style--exuberant and graceful, sometimes ironic but never cynical. His work has earned accolades ranging from the Pulitzer Prize to science fiction's Hugo and Nebula Awards. Conversations with Michael Chabon collects eighteen revealing interviews with the renowned author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, The Yiddish Policemen's Union, and other much-admired works. Spanning nearly twenty years and drawn from science fiction fan magazines and literary journals alike, these interviews shed new light on the central concerns of Chabon's fiction, including the importance of dismantling the false divide between literary and lowbrow, his evolving relationship to Jewish culture and literature, the unique properties of male friendship, and the complexities of race in contemporary America. These interviews are essential reading for anyone seeking a better understanding of the life and work of an author who has been instrumental in defining the landscape of contemporary American fiction.Perspectives on Richard Ford
Par Huey Guagliardo. 2000
This is the first book-length examination of the fiction written by Richard Ford, who gained critical acclaim for The Sportswriter,…
the story of suburbanite Frank Bascombe's struggle to survive loneliness and great loss. That novel, published in 1986, struck a chord with readers and reviewers alike, and Ford, a little-known writer who had for a time considered giving up the writing of fiction, was suddenly hailed in Newsweek as “one of the best writers of his generation.” The Sportswriter, along with its 1995 sequel Independence Day, which became the first novel to win both the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award, made Ford's Frank Bascombe as much a part of the American literary landscape as John Updike's Rabbit Angstrom. With three other novels, a well-received volume of short stories, and a trilogy of novellas to his credit, Ford is now firmly established as a major figure among writers of the post-World War II generation. Perspectives on Richard Ford is the first collection of essays to study the body of Ford's fiction. The nine essays demonstrate that Ford, like few other writers of his time, powerfully depicts what it feels like to live in the secular late-twentieth-century world, a dangerous and uncertain place where human relationships are impoverished and where human existence is often characterized by emptiness, solipsism, and, above all, by a sense of alienation. The contributors tend to view Ford's narratives of alienation in a broad cultural context. His works dramatize the breakdown of the institutions of marriage, family, and community. His protagonists often typify the rootlessness and the nameless longing pervasive in a highly mobile, present-oriented society in which individuals, having lost a sense of the past, relentlessly pursue their own elusive identities in the here and now. The collection, which concludes with a compelling conversation between Ford and the editor, will prove to be an essential companion to the work of one our most intriguing contemporary writers.The Writing Life
Par Ellen Gilchrist. 2005
Celebrated author Ellen Gilchrist played many roles—writer and speaker, wife and lover, mother and grandmother. But she had never tackled…
the role of teacher.Offered the opportunity to teach creative writing at the University of Arkansas, she accepted the challenge and ventured into unknown territory. In the process of teaching more than two hundred students since her first class in 2000, she found inspiration in their lives and ambitions and in the challenge of conveying to them the lessons she had learned from living and writing. The Writing Life brings together fifty essays and vignettes centered on the transforming magic of literature and the teaching and writing of it. A portion of the collection discusses the delicate balance between an artistic life and family commitments, especially the daily pressures and frequent compromises faced by a young mother. Gilchrist next focuses on the process of writing itself with essays ranging from “How I Wrote a Book of Short Stories in Three Months” to “Why Is Rewriting So Hard?” Several essays discuss her appreciation of other writers, from Shakespeare to Larry McMurtry, and the lessons she learned from them. Eudora Welty made an indelible impact on Gilchrist’s work. When Gilchrist takes on the task of teaching, her essays reveal an enriched understanding of the role writing plays in any life devoted to the craft. Humorous and insightful, she assesses her own abilities as an instructor and confronts the challenge of inspiring students to attain the discipline and courage to pursue the sullen art. Some of these pieces have been previously published in magazines, but most are unpublished, and all appear here in book form for the first time.Conversations with Edna O'Brien (Literary Conversations Series)
Par Alice Hughes Kersnowski. 2013
“Who’s afraid of Edna O’Brien?” asks an early interviewer in Conversations with Edna O’Brien. With over fifty years of published…
novels, biographies, plays, telecasts, short stories, and more, it is hard not to be intimidated by her. An acclaimed and controversial Irish writer, O’Brien (b. 1930) saw her early works, starting in 1960 with The Country Girls, banned and burned in Ireland, but often read in secret. Her contemporary work continues to spark debates on the rigors and challenges of Catholic conservatism and the struggle for women to make a place for themselves in the world without anxiety and guilt. The raw nerve of emotion at the heart of her lyrical prose provokes readers, challenges politicians, and proves difficult for critics to place her.In these interviews, O’Brien finds her own critical voice and moves interviewers away from a focus on her life as the “once infamous Edna” toward a focus on her works. Parallels between Edna O’Brien and her literary muse and mentor, James Joyce, are often cited in interviews such as Philip Roth’s description of The Country Girls as a “rural Dubliners.” While Joyce is the centerpiece of O’Brien’s literary pantheon, allusions to writers such as Shakespeare, Chekhov, Beckett, and Woolf become a medium for her critical voice. Conversations with contemporary writers Philip Roth and Glenn Patterson reveal Edna O’Brien’s sense of herself as a contemporary writer. The final interview included here, with BBC personality William Crawley at Queen’s University Belfast, is a synthesis of her acceptance and fame as an Irish writer and an Irish woman and an affirmation of her literary authority.Deep South Dispatch: Memoir of a Civil Rights Journalist (Willie Morris Books in Memoir and Biography)
Par John N. Herbers. 2018
Former New York Times correspondent John N. Herbers (1923-2017), who covered the civil rights movement for more than a decade,…
has produced Deep South Dispatch: Memoir of a Civil Rights Journalist, a compelling story of national and historical significance. Born in the South during a time of entrenched racial segregation, Herbers witnessed a succession of landmark civil rights uprisings that rocked the country, the world, and his own conscience. Herbers's retrospective is a timely and critical illumination on America's current racial dilemmas and ongoing quest for justice.Herbers's reporting began in 1951, when he covered the brutal execution of Willie McGee, a black man convicted for the rape of a white housewife, and the 1955 trial for the murder of Emmett Till, a black teenager killed for allegedly whistling at a white woman. With immediacy and first-hand detail, Herbers describes the assassination of John F. Kennedy; the death of four black girls in the Birmingham, Alabama, church bombing; extensive travels and interviews with Martin Luther King Jr.; Ku Klux Klan cross-burning rallies and private meetings; the Freedom Summer murders in Philadelphia, Mississippi; and marches and riots in St. Augustine, Florida, and Selma, Alabama, that led to passage of national civil rights legislation.This account is also a personal journey as Herbers witnessed the movement with the conflicted eyes of a man dedicated to his southern heritage but who also rejected the prescribed laws and mores of a prejudiced society. His story provides a complex understanding of how the southern status quo, in which the white establishment benefited at the expense of African Americans, was transformed by a national outcry for justice.Fannye Cook: Mississippi's Pioneering Conservationist
Par Dorothy Shawhan. 2017
Mississippi Chapter of The Wildlife Society Outstanding BookConservationist Fannye Cook (1889-1964) was the most widely known scientist in Mississippi and…
was nationally known as the go-to person for biological information or wildlife specimens from the state. This biography celebrates the environmentalist instrumental in the creation of the Mississippi Game and Fish Commission (now called the Mississippi Department of Wildlife, Fisheries, and Parks) and the Mississippi Museum of Natural Science.To accomplish this feat, Cook led an extensive grassroots effort to implement game laws and protect the state's environment. In 1926 she began traveling the state at her own expense, speaking at county fairs, schools, and clubs, and to county boards of supervisors on the status of wildlife populations and the need for management. Eventually she collected a diverse group of supporters from across the state. Due to these efforts, the legislature created the Mississippi Game and Fish Commission in 1932. Thanks to the formation of the Works Progress Administration in 1935, Cook received a WPA grant to conduct a comprehensive plant and animal survey of Mississippi. Under this program, eighteen museums were established within the state, and another one in Jackson, which served as the hub for public education and scientific research.Fannye Cook served as director of the Mississippi Museum of Natural Science until her retirement in 1958. During her tenure, she published many bulletins, pamphlets, scientific papers, and the extensive book Freshwater Fishes of Mississippi.Conversations with Tim O'Brien (Literary Conversations Series)
Par Patrick A. Smith. 2012
On the strength of a National Book Award for his novel Going After Cacciato and a widely acclaimed short-story cycle,…
The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien (b. 1946) cemented his reputation as one of the most compelling chroniclers of Vietnam—and, in the process, was cast as a “Vietnam writer.” But to confine O’Brien to a single piece of ground or a particular style is to ignore the broad sweep of a career spanning nearly four decades. In addition to detailed discussions of all of O’Brien’s work—a memoir, If I Die in a Combat Zone, and seven books of fiction—the sixteen interviews and profiles in Conversations with Tim O’Brien explore common themes, with subtle differences. Looming large is the experience of Vietnam and its influence as well as O’Brien’s youth in Minnesota and the expectations of a midwestern upbringing. Interviews allowed the writer to fully examine the shifting boundaries of truth and identity, memory, and imagination in fiction; the role of war in society; gender issues; and the craft of writing. O’Brien approaches each of these topics and a host of others with a directness and an evident passion that will resonate with both readers and prospective writers.Tell about Night Flowers: Eudora Welty's Gardening Letters, 1940-1949
Par Julia Eichelberger. 2013
Tell about Night Flowers presents previously unpublished letters by Eudora Welty, selected and annotated by scholar Julia Eichelberger. Welty published…
many of her best-known works in the 1940s: A Curtain of Green, The Wide Net, The Robber Bridegroom, Delta Wedding, and The Golden Apples. During this period, she also wrote hundreds of letters to two friends who shared her love of gardening. One friend, Diarmuid Russell, was her literary agent in New York; the other, John Robinson, was a high school classmate and an aspiring writer who served in the Army in WWII, and long the focus of Welty's affection. Welty's lyrical, witty, and poignant discussions of gardening and nature are delightful in themselves; they are also figurative expressions of Welty's views of her writing and her friendships. Taken together with thirty-five illustrations, they form a poetic narrative of their own, chronicling artistic and psychic developments that were underway before Welty was fully conscious of them. By 1949 her art, like her friendships, had evolved in ways that she would never have predicted in 1940. Tell about Night Flowers not only lets readers glimpse Welty in her garden; it also reveals a brilliant and generous mind responding to the public events, people, art, and natural landscapes Welty encountered at home and on her travels during the 1940s. This book enhances our understanding of the life, landscape, and art of a major American writer.Conversations with Edwidge Danticat (Literary Conversations Series)
Par Maxine Lavon Montgomery. 2017
This volume sheds a much-needed light on Edwidge Danticat (b. 1969) and her ability to depict timely issues in sparkling…
prose that delves deep into the borderlands, an uncharted in-between space located outside fixed geographic, cultural, and ideological bounds. Prevalent throughout many interviews here is Danticat's expressed determination not only to reveal Haitian immigrant experience, but also to make that nuanced culture and its vibrant traditions accessible to a wide audience.These interviews coincide with Edwidge Danticat's evolving artistic vision, her steady book publication, and her expanding roles as fiction writer, essayist, memoirist, documentarian, young adult book author, editor, songwriter, cultural critic, and political commentator. Dating from her appearance on the literary scene at the age of twenty-five, the many interviews that she has granted attest to not only her productivity, but also her accessibility to scholars, teachers, writers, and journalists eager for knowledge about her vision. Included in this volume are interviews that range from 2000, covering the publication of her debut work of fiction, Breath, Eyes, Memory, to a personal interview conducted with the volume editor in 2016. In that conversation, which appears for the first time as part of this collection, Danticat provides insight into little-known aspects of her life, art, and politics.Her candid interviews carry out a careful stripping away of preconceived notions of Danticat, disclosing the private and public life of a first-class writer and intellectual whose countless achievements have assured her an enduring place within contemporary world letters.Willie: The Life of Willie Morris
Par Teresa Nicholas. 2016
In 2000, readers voted Willie Morris (1934–1999) Mississippi's favorite nonfiction author of the millennium. After conducting over fifty interviews and…
combing through over eighty boxes of papers in the archives at the University of Mississippi, many of which had never been seen before by researchers, Teresa Nicholas provides new perspectives on a Mississippi writer and editor who changed journalism and redefined what being southern could mean. More than fifty photographs—some published here for the first time, including several by renowned photographer David Rae Morris, Willie's son—enhance the exploration. From an early age, Willie demonstrated a talent for words. At the University of Texas at Austin, he became a controversial editor of the Daily Texan. He later studied history as a Rhodes Scholar in Oxford, England, but by 1960 he was back in Austin, working as editor for the highly regarded Texas Observer. In 1967 Willie became the youngest editor of the nation's oldest magazine, Harper's. His autobiography, North Toward Home, achieved critical as well as artistic success, and it would continue to inspire legions of readers for decades to come. In the final tally, he published hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles, along with twenty-three books. His work covered the gamut from fiction to nonfiction, for both adults and children, often touching on the personal as well as the historical and the topical, and always presented in his lyrical prose. In 1980, he returned to his home state as writer-in-residence at the University of Mississippi. In 1990, he married his editor at the University Press of Mississippi, JoAnne Prichard, and they made a home in Jackson. With his broad knowledge of history, his sensitivity, and his bone-deep understanding of the South, he became a celebrated spokesman for and interpreter of the place he loved.Damning Words: The Life and Religious Times of H. L. Mencken
Par D. G. Hart. 2016
Recounts a famously outspoken agnostic's surprising relationship with Christianity H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) was a reporter, literary critic, editor, author—and…
a famous American agnostic. From his role in the Scopes Trial to his advocacy of science and reason in public life, Mencken is generally regarded as one of the fiercest critics of Christianity in his day. In this biography D. G. Hart presents a provocative, iconoclastic perspective on Mencken's life. Even as Mencken vividly debunked American religious ideals, says Hart, it was Christianity that largely framed his ideas, career, and fame. Mencken's relationship to the Christian faith was at once antagonistic and symbiotic. Using plenty of Mencken's own words, Damning Words superbly portrays an influential figure in twentieth-century America and, at the same time, casts telling new light on his era.Hellfire: Evelyn Waugh and the Hypocrites Club
Par David Fleming. 2024
‘This is a pacey and colourful read … elegantly written.’ – Daisy Dunn, The Times‘The whole book reads rather like…
a Powell novel, with unexpected meetings and reversals … it is a constant pleasure.’ – Mark Amory, The Spectator‘At a rollicking pace, it follows the post-Oxford careers of all the main Hypocrites … Waugh addicts will wish to add it to their shelves.’ – A.N. Wilson, Times Literary SupplementDaily Mail top ten history book of 2022Described by one habitué as ‘a kind of early twentieth-century Hell Fire Club’, the Hypocrites Club counted some of the brightest of the future ‘Bright Young People’ among its members. The one-time secretary was Evelyn Waugh, who used ten of his fellow Hypocrites as inspiration for his fictional characters – seven of them in Brideshead Revisited alone.The Hypocrites didn’t just lend themselves to Waugh’s fiction. Many went on to prominence themselves, including Anthony Powell, Robert Byron, Henry Green, Claud Cockburn and Tom Driberg. Hellfire is the first full-length portrait of this scandalous club and its famous members, who continued to be thorns in the Establishment’s side – throughout war and austerity – for the next five decades.Becoming Ezra Jack Keats (Willie Morris Books in Memoir and Biography)
Par Virginia McGee Butler. 2023
Becoming Ezra Jack Keats offers the first complete biography of acclaimed children’s author and illustrator Ezra Jack Keats (1916–1983) intended…
for adult readers. Drawing extensively from his unpublished autobiography and letters, Becoming Ezra Jack Keats covers the breadth of Keats’s life, taking readers through his early years as the child of immigrant parents, his introduction to illustration and writing, and the full arc of his remarkable career.Beyond a standard biography, this volume presents a time capsule of the political, social, and economic issues evolving during the span of Keats’s lifetime. It also addresses his trailblazing commitment to representation and diversity, most notably in his work The Snowy Day, which won the Caldecott Medal as the first full-color picture book to feature a Black child as the protagonist. Keats far surpassed his father’s prediction that he would be a starving artist. Instead, as shown in Becoming Ezra Jack Keats, he is now regarded as one of the most influential figures in children’s literature, having published twenty-two books translated into sixteen languages, all featuring the diversity he saw in the children outside the window of his Brooklyn studio.