Highlights
Taylor Branch
Main Conference Plenary Speaker
Friday, July 14 at 2 pm
Taylor Branch, Pulitzer Prize-winning author and historian, is best known for his award-winning trilogy of books, collectively called America in the King Years, which chronicles the life of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the history of the American civil rights movement.
The third and final volume was published earlier this year. At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years 1965-68 chronicles the last three years of Dr. King's life, from the march on Montgomery to his assassination in Memphis. "It is a thrilling book, marvelous in both its breadth and its details" wrote the New York Times in its February review of the book.
The first volume of the trilogy, Parting the Waters (1988), won the Pulitzer Prize for History. It is a monumental chronicle of a movement that stirred from Southern black churches to challenge the national conscience during the Eisenhower and Kennedy years. In this masterly continuation of the narrative, Branch recounts the climactic struggles as they commanded the national and international stage. In Pillar of Fire (1998), the second volume of his America in the King Years trilogy, Taylor Branch portrays the civil rights era at its zenith.
Taylor Branch also received the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Christopher Award, and the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Parting the Waters. The book was also named a "Best Book of the Year" by the New York Times and Boston Globe.
The product of nearly 25 years of intensive research and the collection of oral history, Taylor Branch's trilogy has been hail as one of the greatest achievements in the field of American biography.
