Taylor Branch is a Pulitzer Prize winner and best-selling author of America in the King Years.
The Biographer's Craft
Taylor Branch is a Pulitzer Prize winner and best-selling author of the trilogy, America in the King Years. Branch emerged as a national authority on America’s civil rights movement with the publication of Parting the Waters in 1988 followed by Pillar of Fire. With passion and insight, he has chronicled the high-stakes political events and the day-to-day struggles of the farmers and teachers, sharecroppers and dentists who pried their freedom loose from the grip of segregationist whites.
Branch grew up in Martin Luther King’s hometown, Atlanta, in an era of rigid segregation. Branch didn’t engage in civil-rights efforts until, as a graduate student at Princeton University in 1969, he spent a summer working for Atlanta’s Voter Education Project. He scouted rural Georgia counties where black people had been excluded from voting, trying to find black activists willing to work to reverse the disenfranchisement.
Branch graduated from The Westminster Schools in Atlanta in 1964. From there, he went to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill on a prestigious Morehead Scholarship. He graduated in 1968 and went on to earn a M.P.A. from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton in 1970.
Branch served as an assistant editor at The Washington Monthly from 1970-73; he was Washington editor of Harper’s from 1973-76; and he was Washington columnist for Esquire Magazine from 1976-77. He also has written for a wide variety of other publications, including The New York Times Magazine, Sport, The New Republic and Texas Monthly. He was a lecturer in politics and history at Goucher College from 1998 to 2000.
In 1972 Branch helped run the Texas campaign of Democratic presidential nominee George McGovern. Branch’s co-leaders in the effort were Bill Clinton, later to be president of the United States, and a Houston lawyer named Julius Glickman.
He received a five-year MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (also known as a “genius grant”) in 1991 and the National Humanities Medal in 1999.
