by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James Houston

Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston was born on September 26, 1934, in California, where she lived with her father and siblings. On December 7, 1941, the day Hawaii's Pearl Harbor naval station was bombed, her father was arrested on charges that he was smuggling oil to the Japanese navy. Three months later, the entire family was bussed, along with thousands of other people of Japanese ancestry, to Manzanar, an internment camp in southern California. When Jeanne and her family were released from the camp in 1945, they returned to the Pacific Coast. Twenty-eight years later, with her husband James as a co-author, she published Farewell to Manzanar, the story of her life in the internment camp.

Events in History at the Time the Autobiography Takes Place

Second-generation Japanese Americans. In 1924 Congress passed an immigration law that set quotas on the number of immigrants from...