The Warmth of Other Suns
| The Warmth of Other Suns | |
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| Author(s) | Isabel Wilkerson |
| Publisher | Random House |
| Publication date | 2010 |
| Pages | 622 |
| ISBN | ISBN 978-0-679-44432-9 |
| OCLC Number | 741763572 |
The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration (2010) is a historical study by African-American author Isabel Wilkerson.[1][2] It is about the The Great Migration and the Second Great Migration, the movement of blacks out of the Southern United States to the Midwest, Northeast and West between 1915 and 1970.[1][2] The book intertwines a general history and statistical analysis of the entire period, and the biographies of three persons: a sharecropper's wife who left Mississippi in the 1930s for Chicago, named Ida Mae Brandon Gladney; an agricultural worker, George Swanson Starling, who left Florida for New York City in the 1940s; and Robert Joseph Pershing Foster, a doctor who left Louisiana in the early 1950s, for Los Angeles.
Contents |
Title [edit]
The main title of the book is taken from a poem by author Richard Wright, who himself moved from the south to Chicago, in the 1920s.[3] Parts of that poem are excerpted here:
. . .I was taking a part of the South
To transplant in alien soil...
Respond to the warmth of other suns
And, perhaps, to bloom.—published in Black Boy, 1945 (emphasis added)
Awards and honors [edit]
- New York Times bestseller (Nonfiction, 2010);
- New York Times Best Books of the Year (2010);
- New York Times Notable Book of the Year (Nonfiction, 2010);
- Salon Book Award (Nonfiction, 2010);
- Publishers Weekly’s Top 10 Best Books (2010);
- National Book Critics Circle Award (Nonfiction, 2011);
- ALA Notable Book (2011);
- Dayton Literary Peace Prize (Non-Fiction runner-up, 2011);
- Anisfield-Wolf Book Award (2011);
- Heartland Prize (Nonfiction, 2011);
- Mark Lynton History Prize (2011).
Editions [edit]
- The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration, Random House (hardcover, first). ISBN 978-0-679-44432-9
- Paperback, electronic book and audiobook editions.
References [edit]
- ^ a b "The Lives Gained by Fleeing Jim Crow" by Janet Maslin, New York Times Book Review, August 30, 2010
- ^ a b "Freedom Trains" by David Oshinsky, New York Times Book Review, September 2, 2010
- ^ Burch, Audra D.S. (2011-11-20). "Leaving home, and finding it". Miami Herald. Retrieved 22 December 2011.
External links [edit]
- The Warmth of Other Suns, official book website
- Randomhouse Publisher's website, with Synopsis
