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Isabel Wilkerson (b. 1961) is a journalist and bestselling author of two nonfiction books that offer rich explorations into Black American heritage and life as well as the history and culture of the United States more generally. The first of these works, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration (2010) is a deep study of the Great Migration, in which six million Black Americans moved out of the South and into the Northeast, Midwest, and West from the 1910s through the 1960s. The Warmth of Other Suns examines the broad cultural impact of this migration by providing research and data, but it also personalizes the academic information by offering moving accounts of three individuals who took part in the mass migration and whose life stories embody the experiences of countless other unnamed Black Americans.

Wilkerson, who was born in Washington, D.C., has a direct connection to the Great Migration in that her parents both took part in it. Her father, who became a bridge engineer, had been a member of the famed Tuskegee Airmen during World War II. Wilkerson studied journalism at Howard University, an historically Black college, and went on to have a distinguished career in journalism, including being the first Black woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Journalism in 1994 while she worked for the New York Times. Additionally, she has been a journalism professor, lecturer, and board member at universities including Emory, Princeton, Northwestern, Boston College, and Columbia.

The publication and critical acclaim of The Warmth of Other Suns in 2010 was the culmination of 15 years of research by Wilkerson. Her second book, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, also garnered strong praise when it was published in 2020, with the New York Times proclaiming it “an instant American classic.” Like The Warmth of Other Suns, it combines academic research with personal stories that humanize its subject. Caste explores the stratification of race in the United States, which Wilkerson unflinchingly compares to better known and more widely recognized caste systems in India and in Nazi Germany.

Caste was partly the basis for a film adaptation called Origin that was released in 2023. Directed by Ava DuVernay and starring Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor as Isabel Wilkerson, Origin blends elements of Wilkerson’s life story with key messages derived from Caste. It was richly shot on a large budget that DuVernay obtained partly with grant money from foundations that were eager to extend the reach of Wilkerson’s nonfiction bestseller. Aspects of Wilkerson’s personal life that appear in Origin include a depiction of her marriage to her second husband, Brett Hamilton, who is played by Jon Bernthal. Hamilton died in 2015 after receiving a brain tumor diagnosis in 2000.

Next section Style & Presentation: The Use of Anecdotes & Metaphors in Caste

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