Taylor Branch

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  Taylor Branch is an American author and public speaker best known for his landmark narrative history of the civil rights era, America in the King Years. The trilogy’s first book, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63, won the Pulitzer Prize and numerous other awards in 1989. Two successive volumes also gained critical and popular success: Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years, 1963-65, and At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-1968.

  In 2009, Simon and Schuster published The Clinton Tapes: Wrestling History with the President. This personal memoir tells of an unprecedented eight-year project to gather a sitting president’s comprehensive oral history on tape.  Branch suspended work on the King books about once a month to meet secretly in the White House residence, nearly always late at night.  They recorded candid observations for posterity.

  Aside from writing, Taylor Branch speaks before a variety of audiences.   His 2008 address at the National Cathedral marked the 40th anniversary of Dr. King’s last Sunday sermon from that pulpit.  In 2009, he gave the Theodore H. White Lecture on the Press and Politics at Harvard.

  His musical sidelights have spanned the Atlanta Boy Choir in the 1950s and a contemporary octet for spirituals.  In 2006, he and two friends reconstituted their 1960s college band as the cover group Off Our Rocker, which has released two CDs in playful tribute to the Beatles.

  Branch began his career in 1970 as a staff journalist for The Washington Monthly, Harper’s, andEsquire.  Citations include the Dayton Literary Peace Prize Lifetime Achievement Award in 2008 and the National Humanities Medal in 1999.