DUMBO

Pulitzer Prize-winning DUMBO author pens highly anticipated nonfiction book

April 10, 2018 Brooklyn Daily Eagle
Gilbert King. Images courtesy of Penguin Random House
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Gilbert King’s “Devil in the Grove,” winner of the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in Nonfiction, was a landmark work of investigative nonfiction. Heralded as “must-read, cannot-put-down history” (New York Times), King delivered a “powerful and well-told drama of Southern injustice” (Chicago Tribune) as he unspooled the saga of the Groveland Four, a group of black men falsely convicted of raping a young white woman in central Florida. Praised Salon: “King recreates an important yet overlooked moment in American history with a chilling, atmospheric narrative that reads more like a Southern Gothic novel than a work of history.”

The long-buried evidence uncovered by Gilbert King was shocking. His revelatory book spurned renewed interest and outrage about the racism, corruption, injustice and violence endemic to Florida law enforcement and justice systems. At long last, this past spring the Florida House of Representatives unanimously passed a resolution apologizing to the families of the Groveland Four, and the state moved to expedite the exonerations of the wrongly accused men.

King will present his new book at the Brooklyn Historical Society on Thursday, July 19 at 6:30 p.m. with a talk, Q&A and book signing.

The author’s research for “Devil in the Grove” led him led him further down a trail of corruption, miscarriage of justice and secrecy in the region, and this spring, Riverhead is proud to publish “Beneath a Ruthless Sun: A True Story of Violence, Race, and Justice Lost and Found” (April 24). Rippling with tensions over sex, race and class, “Beneath a Ruthless Sun” is longform investigative nonfiction at its absolute finest, a gripping true-crime tale that raises themes that haunt us still today: justice perverted by bigotry and the force of white privilege; wrongful incarceration; the power of the free press. Gilbert King is among a master class of journalists delivering vital work that seeks to expose injustice and to protect and defend the innocent, alongside writers like Rebecca Skloot, Matthew Desmond, Barbara Ehrenreich and many others. “Beneath a Ruthless Sun” is set to be a defining and essential publication.

King was awarded the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in Nonfiction for “The Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America,” which was also a New York Times bestseller and the runner-up for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. A featured contributor to Smithsonian magazine and “The Marshall Project,” King has also written about justice for The New York Times and The Washington Post. He lives in DUMBO.

 

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