To finish “The Warmth of Other Suns,” her magisterial new history of the black migration in America, which carried millions of Southerners northward or westward, Isabel Wilkerson had to complete a sort of reverse migration. She began writing the book in Chicago, where she was the bureau chief for The New York Times, and finished it more than a decade later in a house in the Virginia Highland neighborhood of Atlanta. Ms. Wilkerson moved here in 2001, for reasons unconnected to the book, and immediately discovered, she said this week, that she “needed to be here, only I didn’t know it.”
“I needed to look through the exile’s heart and feel that distant, rejecting, hurtful feeling,” she added. “I needed to come here to see what they left.”
Though she had never grown anything before, she planted an elaborate garden and began collecting art from the 1940s: portraits of now mostly anonymous black people. On a shelf next to the Pulitzer Prize that Ms. Wilkerson won in 1994 for feature writing for The Times, she keeps the Corona typewriter that belonged to her grandfather, Charles Richardson. An elevator operator in Rome, Ga., he dreamed of becoming a writer, though at the time he wasn’t allowed to walk through the door of the local newspaper. “He wrote reams and reams of what was probably a memoir that no one took seriously,” Ms. Wilkerson said. “I wish we had paid more attention.”
“The Warmth of Other Suns,” which John Stauffer, writing in The Wall Street Journal, called “a brilliant and stirring epic” with “great narrative and literary power,” took 15 years to finish. That’s a long time even in the sometimes glacial world of book publishing. There was no Google when Ms. Wilkerson began and no JSTOR, the online archive of scholarly articles. Most people didn’t yet use e-mail. The editor who acquired the book moved on to another company, and so did the editor who inherited it next.
