The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson

When she published it in 2020, Caste was also an instant success. Wilkerson spent the 2010s working on her next book, Caste: The Origin of Our Discontents. The Warmth of Other Suns was a national bestseller and won numerous national prizes, including the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Heartland Prize for Nonfiction. For the next decade and a half, she continued her research while taking academic positions at Harvard University, Emory University, Boston University, Princeton University, Northwestern University, and Columbia University. Shortly thereafter, Wilkerson began her research for The Warmth of Other Suns, thanks largely to a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation fellowship. This made her the first Black woman reporter to win journalism’s most prestigious award. She won the 1994 Pulitzer Prize in Feature Writing for her work on the Great Flood of 1993 and in-depth profile of a Chicago fourth grader. After graduation, she spent a decade working at The New York Times. She would eventually become its editor-in-chief and take internships at papers like the Washington Post. She then attended the nearby Howard University for the express purpose of working on the university newspaper. Thanks to her parents’ decision to migrate, Wilkerson grew up in multicultural, integrated Washington, D.C., where she discovered a passion for journalism in high school.

Wilkerson’s mother grew up in Rome, Georgia, and Wilkerson tells part of her migration story in The Warmth of Other Suns. Her father was from Petersburg, Virginia and served in World War II as one of the Tuskegee Airman (a prominent cohort of Black pilots). Isabel Wilkerson identifies as “a Southerner once removed” because her parents both participated in the Great Migration.

Part Five: More North and West Than South.Part Four: The Fullness of the Migration.Part Three: The Appointed Time of Their Coming.Part Two: Robert Joseph Pershing Foster.Part One: The Great Migration, 1915–1970.

The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson