January 26, 2013: Pulitzer Prize winning author Taylor Branch releases edited version of his acclaimed trilogy
The Baltimore Sun
The math is daunting: More than 2300 pages of prose winnowed down to 190, including photographs and the occasional blank sheet that signals chapter breaks. Yet, that’s exactly the challenge that author and historian Taylor Branch tackled when he condensed his three-part history of U.S. civil rights movement into one selnder volume that could be taught in the nation’s classrooms. Read full article >
January 25, 2013: Taylor Branch on King, LBJ, Obama, and College Sports
The Atlantic
Taylor Branch is known to the world as author of the monumental “America in the King Years” trilogy. He’s additionally known to Atlantic readers for his definitive cover story “The Shame of College Sports” in late 2011. He is additionally known to me as my immediate predecessor as a writer and editor at The Washington Monthly in the early 1970s. I was just out of graduate school and looking for a job, and he was leaving the job and headed to Texas to work with a young aspiring politico from Arkansas [yes, Yale law student Bill Clinton] on the McGovern campaign there. Read full article >
January 1, 2013: Q&A with Taylor Branch
The author discusses his latest book on civil rights
Taylor Branch published Parting the Waters, the first volume in his definitive three-part history of the civil rights movement, in 1988. In the quarter-century since, virtually everything has changed about the way books are published and how history is consumed. Branch said for years he had fielded complaints from college professors and high school teachers that, although they loved the storytelling approach of his MLK trilogy, they simply could not compel students to plow through all 3,000 pages. Read full article >
