The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration

New York Times Bestseller • National Book Critics Circle Award Winner • One of Barack Obama’s Favorite Books of the Year • One of Time’s Ten Best Nonfiction Books of the Decade • One of The New York Times’ Five Best Books of the 21st Century • A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of the Century • Los Angeles Times’ #1 Nonfiction Book of the Last 30 Years • An Oprah Daily Best Nonfiction Book of the Past Two Decades

“A brilliant and stirring epic … Ms. Wilkerson does for the Great Migration what John Steinbeck did for the Okies in The Grapes of Wrath; she humanizes history, giving it emotional and psychological depth.” — John Stauffer, The Wall Street Journal

“What she’s done with these oral histories is stow memory in amber.” — Lynell George, Los Angeles Times

Winner of the Mark Lynton History Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Award for Nonfiction, the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize, the Hurston-Wright Award for Nonfiction, the Hillman Prize for Book Journalism, the NAACP Image Award for Best Literary Debut, and the Stephen Ambrose Oral History Prize.

Finalist for the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize.

In this modern classic, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Isabel Wilkerson presents the definitive account of one of the most significant yet often overlooked events in American history: the Great Migration, during which six million Black Americans left the South for the North and West between World War I and 1970 in search of freedom, opportunity, and a better life.

Wilkerson tells this sweeping story through the unforgettable lives of three individuals: Ida Mae Gladney, a Mississippi sharecropper’s wife who fled to Chicago in 1937; George Starling, who escaped the dangers of Jim Crow Florida for Harlem in 1945; and Robert Foster, a Louisiana surgeon who journeyed to California in 1953 to pursue the opportunities denied to him in the South.

Following their perilous journeys by train and automobile and tracing the lives they built in unfamiliar cities, The Warmth of Other Suns transforms historical research into deeply personal narrative. Richly documented, beautifully written, and profoundly moving, it reveals the Great Migration as an “unrecognized immigration” within America itself and stands as one of the essential works of modern American history.