The Author (Ta-Nehisi Coates)

Ta-Nehisi Coates is an award-winning American journalist and memoirist. His writings tend to focus on different aspects of being black in America as he reports on both the experiences of others (through journalistic reporting and investigation) and explores / reflects upon his own (through the writing of memoir). He was born and raised in Baltimore, MD (a community that he describes as profoundly affected by long-simmering tensions between whites and blacks); attended university in Washington DC (a school populated mostly by blacks in a city with a substantial black population of its own); and eventually settled with his family in New York City. As the book relates, the events and circumstances associated with each of these phases of his life led to different, equally influential discoveries of what it means to be black in America.

Coates writes that for his entire life, he has struggled...