Henry Louis Gates, Jr. directs the Hutchins Center for African and African-American Research at Harvard University. He is the host of the TV series, Finding Your Roots on PBS. He is one of America's best known public intellectuals, historians, literary critics, teachers, and filmmakers. He grew up in Piedmont, West Virginia, where his father worked in a paper mill and moonlighted as a janitor and his mother cleaned houses. He is known to friends as "Skip" because of a football injury he sustained at the age of 14 in 1964. What was it like for African-Americans growing up in West Virginia? This forthright, unswerving, sometimes intimate, memoir candidly answers that question. "Affecting, beautifully written and morally complex...The heart of the memoir is Gates' portrait of his family, and its placement in a black society whose strength, richness and self-confidence thrived in the darkness of segregation."--Richard Eder. This book won the Chicago Tribune’s Heartland Award and the Lillian Smith Prize.
New York: Vintage/Random House, a 1995 paperback reprint of a 1994 release. 216 page. Trade paperback