They stand as unselfconscious as if the photograph were being taken at a church picnic and not during one of the pitched battles of the civil rights struggle. None of them knows that the image will appear in "Life "magazine""or that it will become an icon of its era. The year is 1962, and these seven white Mississippi lawmen have gathered to stop James Meredith from integrating the University of Mississippi. One of them is swinging a billy club.
More than thirty years later, award-winning journalist and author Paul Hendrickson sets out to discover who these men were, what happened to them after the photograph was taken, and how racist attitudes shaped the way they lived their lives. But his ultimate focus is on their children and grandchildren, and how the prejudice bequeathed by the fathers was transformed, or remained untouched, in the sons. Sons of Mississippi is a scalding yet redemptive work of social history, a book of eloquence and subtlely that tracks the movement of racism across three generations and bears witness to its ravages among both black and white Americans.

THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER 'She'd been intimately his, and he hers, for twenty-seven years - which were his final twenty-seven years. She'd lasted through three wives, the Nobel Prize, and all his ruin. He'd owned her, fished her, worked her and rode her, from the waters of Key West to the Bahamas to the Dry Tortugas to the north coast and archipelagos of Cuba.' Even in his most accomplished period, Hemingway carried within him the seeds of his tragic decline and throughout this period he had one constant - his beloved boat, Pilar. The boat represented and witnessed everything he loved in life - virility, deep-sea fishing, access to his beloved ocean, freedom, women and booze and the formative years of his children. Paul Hendrickson focuses on the period from 1934 to 1961, from the pinnacle of Hemingway's fame to his suicide. He has delved into the life of Hemingway and done the seemingly impossible: present him to us in a whole new light.

From National Book Critics Circle Award winner Paul Hendrickson, a brilliantly conceived and illuminating reconsideration of a key period in the life of Ernest Hemingway that will forever change the way he is perceived
and understood.
Focusing on the years 1934 to 1961--from Hemingway's pinnacle as the reigning monarch of American letters until his suicide--Paul Hendrickson traces the writer's exultations and despair around the one constant in his life during this time: his beloved boat, "Pilar.
"Drawing on previously unpublished material, including interviews with Hemingway's sons, Hendrickson shows that for all the writer's boorishness, depression and alcoholism, and despite his choleric anger, he was capable of remarkable generosity--to struggling writers, to lost souls, to the dying son of a friend. Hemingway's Boat is both stunningly original and deeply gripping, an invaluable contribution to our understanding of this great American writer, published fifty years after his death.

From the award-winning and best-selling author of Hemingway's Boat - a ground-breaking biography that illuminates the life, mind and work of one of the icons of twentieth-century America. Frank Lloyd Wright has long been known as both a supreme artist and an insufferable egotist who held in contempt almost everything aside from his own genius as an architect. But in this masterly work we discover a man dogged by traumas, racked by lies, and stifled by the myths he wove around himself: a man aware of the choices he made, and of their costs. This is the Wright who was haunted by his father, about whom he told the greatest lie of his life. And this is the Wright of many other overlooked aspects of his story: his close, and perhaps romantic, relationship with friend and early mentor Cecil Corwin; the connection between the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 and the murder of his mistress, her two children and four others at his beloved Wisconsin home by a servant gone mad; and the eerie, unmistakable role of fires in his eventful life. Showing us Wright's facades along with their cracks, Hendrickson helps us form a deep and more human understanding of the man, and a fresh appreciation of his monumental artistic achievements. With prodigious research, unique vision and his ability to make sense of a life in ways at once unexpected, poetic and brilliant, he has given us the defining book on one of the greatest creative talents of twentieth-century America.