They stand as unselfconscious as if the photograph were being taken at a church picnic and not during one of the pitched battles of the civil rights struggle. None of them knows that the image will appear in Life magazine or that it will become an icon of its era. The year is 1962, and these seven white Mississippi lawmen have gathered to stop James Meredith from integrating the University of Mississippi. One of them is swinging a billy club. More than thirty years later, award-winning journalist and author Paul Hendrickson sets out to discover who these men were, what happened to them after the photograph was taken, and how racist attitudes shaped the way they lived their lives. But his ultimate focus is on their children and grandchildren, and how the prejudice bequeathed by the fathers was transformed, or remained untouched, in the sons. Sons of Mississippi is a scalding yet redemptive work of social history, a book of eloquence and subtlely that...

The author of the award-winning Sons of Mississippi now reveals Ernest Hemingway in a wholly new light.Focusing on the years 1934 to 1961--from Hemingway's pinnacle as the reigning monarch of American letters until his suicide--Paul Hendrickson traces the writer's highs and lows around the one constant in his life during this time: his beloved boat, Pilar. We follow him from Key West to Paris, New York, and Cuba, returning whenever he could to Pilar to exult in the sea, to fish, to drink, to entertain celebrities and friends and seduce women, to be with his children. But as his demons grew in power, we see that Pilar was also where he cursed his critics, saw marriages and friendships dissolve, and tried, in vain, to escape his increasingly diminished capacities. Drawing on previously unpublished material, including interviews with Hemingway's sons, Hendrickson reveals a man of choleric anger nonetheless capable of remarkable generosity, who,...