Introduction

Farewell to Manzanar: A True Story of Japanese American Experience during and after the World War II Internment, the memoir that Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston coauthored with her husband, James D. Houston, in 1973 and dedicated to her deceased parents and brother, presents a vivid sequence of episodes illustrating the disastrous effects of racial prejudice on law-abiding, patriotic Japanese Americans during World War II. Beginning with the announcement of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Jeanne (the narrator) shares a flood of painful memories and reflections about her own family and her Japanese American neighbors in Southern...