As part of its recent “100 Best Books of the 21st Century” project, The New York Times Book Review is interviewing some of the authors whose books appeared on the list. This week, Isabel Wilkerson joins our host Gilbert Cruz to discuss her 2010 book “The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration.” In his write-up for that project, Dwight Garner called it “the most vital and compulsively readable work of history in recent memory.”
“The Warmth of Other Suns,” both magisterial and intimate, details Black Americans’ journeys from the South to the North and West beginning in 1915. It was Wilkerson’s first book. “I had grand ambitions for what it could be,” she said, adding that as she began writing, she realized what a responsibility she had to all the people who had told her their stories. “I had to convert this into something that would be worthy of the trust that they had in me.
“It’s basically the same challenge that any writer has,” she added. “One word followed by another word followed by another word as evocative, as poetic, as lyrical, as vibrant as you possibly can make it. And then write that next sentence. And there you go.”
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