Writing

You know you're a writer when . . . You'll never forgive your parents for your happy childhood. . . . The doctor tells you that you have terminal cancer and you think, "I can use this." . . . You accidentally sign a check with your pen name. . . . You know more than ten synonyms for "blue." . . . You write your Christmas letter as if it were War and Peace.Many readers will recognize themselves in this collection of observations about the eccentric, quirky, word-obsessedcondition that is being a writer.

The broadest and most comprehensive collection of writings available by an early civil and women’s rights pioneer Seventy-one years before Rosa Parks’s courageous act of resistance, police dragged a young black journalist named Ida B. Wells off a train for refusing to give up her seat. The experience shaped Wells’s career, and—when hate crimes touched her life personally—she mounted what was to become her life’s work: an anti-lynching crusade that captured international attention. This volume covers the entire scope of Wells’s remarkable career, collecting her early writings, articles exposing the horrors of lynching, essays from her travels abroad, and her later journalism. The Light of Truth is both an invaluable resource for study and a testament to Wells’s long career as a civil rights activist.