'A landmark piece of non-fiction' Janet Maslin The New York Times From the winner of the
Pulitzer Prize this is one of the great untold stories of American history: the migration of
black citizens who fled the south and went north in search of a better life From 1915 to
1970 an exodus of almost six million people would change the face of America. With stunning
historical detail Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson gives us this definitive
vividly dramatic account of how these journeys unfolded. Based on interviews with more than a
thousand people and access to new data and official records The Warmth of Other Suns tells
the story of America's Great Migration through the lives of three unique individuals: Ida Mae
Gladney who in 1937 left sharecropping and prejudice in Mississippi for Chicago where she
achieved quiet blue-collar success and in old age voted for Barack Obama when he ran for an
Illinois Senate seat sharp and quick-tempered George Starling who in 1945 fled Florida for
Harlem where he endangered his job fighting for civil rights saw his family fall and finally
found peace in God and Robert Foster who left Louisiana in 1953 to pursue a medical career
the personal physician to Ray Charles as part of a glitteringly successful medical career.
Wilkerson brilliantly captures their first treacherous and exhausting cross-country journeys
as well as how they changed their new homes forever. 'You will never forget these people' Gay
Talese 'A brilliant and stirring epic' John Stauffer Wall Street Journal 'The mass
migration of African Americans out of the US south forever changed the country's cultural
fabric - and Wilkerson's history of this period is full of sacrifice and hope ... a long
overdue account' Lettecha Johnson Guardian 'A deeply affecting finely crafted and heroic
book. . . .Wilkerson has taken on one of the most important demographic upheavals of the past
century and told it through the lives of three people ... lyrical and tragic' Jill Lepore New
Yorker
