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John Grisham NEW BIOGRAPHY

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Overview

It is no understatement that John Grisham, author of such legal thrillers as A Time to Kill, The Firm, The Pelican Brief, and The Client has achieved the status of what Entertainment Weekly called "a genuine pop-culture demigod." His books have shared unprecedented months on best-seller lists, and, all told, numbered more than 275 million in print across the world, and have been translated into more than 40 languages. Dubbed "grab-it-at-the-airport" novels, they have also made their author a multimillionaire. Along with author Scott Turow, also a former practicing attorney, Grisham has been credited with mastering a genre: the fast-paced, plot-driven legal thriller that thrusts an unwitting, sympathetic hero or heroine in the middle of a corrupt conspiracy and provides...
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It is no understatement that John Grisham, author of such legal thrillers as A Time to Kill, The Firm, The Pelican Brief, and The Client has achieved the status of what Entertainment Weekly called "a genuine pop-culture demigod."

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While critical response was favorable, the public's reaction to The Secret Life of Bees was phenomenal. The novel sold more than 4.5 million copies. "Honestly, the last thing I ever imagined is that The Secret Life of Bees would become as successful as it did," Kidd remarked in a journal entry posted on her home page.

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Best-selling author, social critic and influential literary figure Richard Wright was born on September 4, 1908, to Nathan Wright and Ella Wilson, both children of slaves, on a plantation near Roxie, Mississippi. His father was an illiterate sharecropper and his mother was a schoolteacher. Finding farm life unprofitable, the family moved to Memphis, Tennessee, where Wright encountered violence, racism and eventual poverty when his father abandoned the family.

After his mother fell ill in 1915, Wright and his brother were sent to an orphanage, then back to Mississippi to live with their grandparents. Wright felt isolated as a non-religious member of the strict Seventh Day Adventist household. He published his first short story, "The Voodoo of Hell's Half-Acre," in 1924 in The Southern Register and held a series of jobs before moving to Chicago in 1927.

As part of the new black urban intelligentsia evolving in northern cities like Chicago and New York, Wright became a critic of the black urban experience and in 1932 joined the Communist Party. He was influenced by University of Chicago sociologists Robert Park and Horace Cayton, Jr., who portrayed black urban spaces as ghettoes mired in poverty. Like most migrants to the north, the life Wright experienced did not live up to his expectations. He began to see conflicts within the Communist philosophy, and eventually abandoned his affiliation. In 1937, he moved to New York City, where he won federal funding as a writer through the Works Progress Administration. Three years later he published his most famous fictional novel, Native Son (1940).
became an instant best seller with more than 250,000 copies sold within three weeks of its release. It was the first book by a black writer to be endorsed by the Book-of-the-Month Club, reaching an even wider audience. Native Son remains one of the most influential novels of the 20th Century. In Native Son Wright uses the story of Bigger Thomas, a 20-year-old black migrant, to illustrate the poverty, hopelessness and alienation of the black residents in Chicago's South Side. His was the first of the genre of "ghetto realism" novels that remains popular today.

In addition to his early alignment with Communism, Wright went through several philosophical phases in his literary career, like his existential novel The Outsider (1953), and his anti-colonialist essays in White Man, Listen! (1957). Despite his major and often abrupt political and sociological shifts, he consistently promoted black culture and black protest that he saw emerging in urban life. His writings, including his acclaimed autobiographical Black Boy (1945), in many ways presaged the Black Power movement of the 1960s and 1970s.

In 1941, Wright married Ellen Poplar after an earlier failed marriage, and they had two daughters. He moved his family to Paris in 1946, stating his reasons in a poem titled "I Choose Exile" (1950). In Paris, it seemed to Wright that for the first time in his life he could be both a writer and a black man.

Richard Wright was one of the first African American writers to achieve literary fame and fortune in the U.S. He died in Paris on November 28, 1960 as one of the most influential African-American writers of the 20th century.

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Image Ownership: Public Domain Best-selling author, social critic and influential literary figure Richard Wright was born on September 4, 1908, to Nathan Wright and Ella Wilson, both children of slaves, on a plantation near Roxie, Mississippi. His father was an illiterate sharecropper and his ... Read MoreRichard Wright (1908-1960)

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https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zOmyfV-CMWAzj7gffSEOBpuqOvn9yqNoreiyygDATIA/edit

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by Mady Duvall, Charlie Wilson, Jenna Chui

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ROME (Reuters) - For Foreign Minister Luigi Di Maio it was a bit of harmless, social media fun, for others it highlighted what some say is a national blindness to insidious racism lurking just under the skin of predominantly white Italy.

When Di Maio appeared last week sporting a strikingly deep sun tan, a wave of memes hit the internet showing his face superimposed onto the bodies of prominent Black figures.

At a time when the Black Lives Matter mantra is resonating across much of the world, such imagery would be viewed as an anathema in many countries. But rather than condemn the posts, Di Maio made them his own by putting a selection on Facebook.

One of the pictures showed him as U.S. basketball great Michael Jordan, another placed his face over that of one of Bill Cosby's children in the U.S. sitcom "The Cosby Show", in what was seen as Di Maio adopting a digitized form of Blackface.

"Guys. I promise that next summer I'll wear factor 50 suntan cream. And thank you for making my day lighter," Di Maio wrote, ending his post with an emoji of a laughing face.

It wasn't a laughing matter for everyone.

"What is funny about the color of my skin?" said Igiaba Scego, an Italian-Somali author who lives in Rome. "This came from the foreign minister. He should be setting an example. Instead he minimized something that is clearly racist."

Traditionally a nation of emigrants, Italy has only become a major destination for immigrants since the start of the 21st century and there has been relatively little debate here over the country's colonial past, racism or integration.

Blackface began in New York vaudeville shows in the 1830s, when slavery was still legal in the U.S. South, and featured white performers who darkened their faces to caricature blacks on plantations as lazy and stupid. Its usage today in the English-speaking world is synonymous with racism.

A chastened Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had to fight for his political life last year after pictures emerged of him with his face blackened at a 2001 fancy dress party.

While Di Maio, a 32-year-old leader of the anti-establishment 5-Star Movement, did not physically blacken his face, critics like Scego said the digital imagery was pungent.

Tellingly, in a nation renown for its ruthless politics, Di Maio's many rivals did not look to capitalize on the post. On the contrary, one of his fiercest foes - the conservative daily Il Giornale - defended him from accusations of racism.

"It seems incredible to write it here, but if we have to choose between the innocent freedom to joke about a tan and the Orwellian totalitarianism of stupid censors in search of imaginary racism, then we back Di Maio," the paper said in a front page editorial on Saturday.

Contacted by Reuters, Di Maio did not respond to a request for comment on the issue.

MUSSOLINI MONUMENTS

Rights activist Tareke Brhane, an Italian citizen originally from Eritrea, said such "jokes" were commonplace here. "You are discriminated because of your skin color. You have to deal with this for the rest of your life," he said.

Unlike other European countries, Italy remains an overwhelmingly white, Roman Catholic country.

Just 8.8% of Italy's 60 million registered residents are foreigners and of these, less than half a million come from sub-Saharan Africa. Latest estimates suggest there are also some 560,000 migrants without official papers living here, kept on the margins of society by their inability to join the workforce.

Such numbers might go some way to explain a generalized lack of sensitivity around race issues.

While the killing of George Floyd by a U.S. policeman in May triggered large demonstrations around the world in support of the Black Lives Matter cause, the response in Italy was muted.

The movement also led to a renewed focus on Europe's colonial abuses, especially in Britain and Belgium where the statues of some historical figures were toppled.

In Italy, students threw red paint over the statue of a journalist, Indro Montanelli, who once admitted, without any remorse, that he had bought a 12-year-old Eritrean girl as a wife during Italy's colonial rule there in the 1930s.

But monuments built to honor one of the country's most enthusiastic colonialists, fascist leader Benito Mussolini, remain unscathed.

Historian Francesco Perfetti, a professor at Luiss University in Rome, says the push for colonialism started late in Italy compared with other European nations and left little impact on the nation's psyche.

"In the mind of the Italians there is not even the perception of having been a colonial state," he told Reuters.

As a country which saw millions of its citizens emigrate in the 19th and 20th centuries in search of a better life, Perfetti believes Italians are more tolerant of migrants than elsewhere.

"The Italian nature is not racist while in American history it is an endemic, profound phenomenon," he said.

Scego, who was born in Rome in 1974, says Italians need to be taught about the crimes the country committed in Ethiopia, Somalia, Libya and Eritrea, and be made more aware of the importance of integration.

"Much work still needs to be done here," she said. "It is a strange country. I love it, but it needs to move forward and see what is happening in the rest of the world."

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Italy minister's embrace of 'Blackface' memes spotlights racism

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ROME (Reuters) - For Foreign Minister Luigi Di Maio it was a bit of harmless, social media fun, for others it highlighted what some say is a national blindness to insidious racism lurking just under the skin of predominantly white Italy.

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Sue Monk Kidd was raised in the small town of Sylvester, Georgia, a place that deeply influenced the writing of her first novel The Secret Life of Bees. She graduated from Texas Christian University in 1970 and later took creative writing courses at Emory University and Anderson College, as well as studying at Sewanee, Bread Loaf, and other writers conferences. In 2016, TCU conferred on her an honorary doctor of letters degree.

Her book When the Heart Waits, published by Harper SanFrancisco in 1990 has become a touchstone on contemplative spirituality. In 1996, Harper published The Dance of the Dissident Daughter, describing Kidd's journey into feminist theology, a memoir that had a groundbreaking effect within religious circles.

In her forties, Kidd turned her attention to writing fiction, winning the South Carolina Fellowship in Literature and the 1996 Poets & Writers Exchange Program in Fiction. Her short stories appeared in TriQuarterly, Nimrod, and other literary journals and received a Katherine Anne Porter award and citations in Best American Short Stories ' 100 Distinguished Stories.

When her first novel, The Secret Life of Bees, was published by Viking in 2002, it became a genuine literary phenomenon, spending more than 2½ years on the New York Times bestseller list. It has been translated into 36 languages and sold more than 8 million copies worldwide. Bees was named the Book Sense Paperback Book of the Year in 2004, long-listed for the 2002 Orange Prize in England, and won numerous awards. For over a decade, the novel was produced on stage by The American Place Theater, and in 2008 it was adapted into a movie by Fox Searchlight, which won the People's Choice award for best movie and the NAACP Image award for best picture. The 2019 off-broadway production at The Atlantic Theater won the AUDELCO VIV award for best musical. The novel is taught widely in middle school, high school, and college classrooms.

Kidd's second novel, The Mermaid Chair, has sold well over a million copies since its publication by Viking in 2005, reaching #1 on the New York Times bestseller list and remaining on the hardcover and paperback lists for nine months. Winner of the 2005 Quill Award for General Fiction, the novel was longlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, translated into 24 languages, and made into a television movie by Lifetime.

The spiritual essays, meditations, and inspirational stories Kidd wrote in her thirties were collected into a single volume, Firstlight: The Early Inspiration Writings and published by Guideposts Books in 2006 and Penguin in 2007.

After traveling with her daughter, Ann Kidd Taylor, to sacred sites in Greece, Turkey, and France, Kidd and Taylor co-authored a memoir, Traveling with Pomegranates: A Mother-Daughter Story. Published by Viking in 2009, it appeared on numerous bestseller lists, including the New York Times list and has been published in several languages.

The Invention of Wings, Kidd's third novel was published in 2014 by Viking to wide critical acclaim. It debuted at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list where it spent a total of 9 months. It has sold over a million copies and been translated into over 20+ languages thus far. The novel has won several literary awards, including the Florida Book of Year Award and the SIBA Book Award. It was also nominated for the International Dublin Literary Award and was chosen for Oprah's Book Club 2.0.

Kidd's much anticipated novel, The Book of Longings, was published April 21, 2020.

Kidd serves on the Writers Council for Poets & Writers, Inc. She lives in North Carolina with her husband, Sandy, and dog, Barney.

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Sue Monk Kidd was raised in the small town of Sylvester, Georgia, a place that deeply influenced the writing of her first novel The Secret Life of Bees . She graduated from Texas Christian University in 1970 and later took creative writing courses at Emory University and Anderson College, as well as studying at Sewanee, Bread Loaf, and other writers conferences.

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https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xsKDdE4TnreAFsgoV2uvXNPKcWSjYHd-OFfPxgkmpa0/edit?usp=sharing

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https://www.saatchiart.com/art/Painting-AN-AMERICAN-TARGET/25689/4264918/view

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https://www.jgrisham.com/bio/

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Author of The Secret Life of Bees

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"Inside the mind of white America" Video Link

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"Inside the mind of white America" Video Link

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Inside the mind of white America - BBC News

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https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-53428863