National Book Foundation

[National Book Foundation]

For ‪Women’s History Month‬, we’re bringing you #Women Write the World, daily posts of our female National Book Award Nonfiction Honorees whose expository writing on matters here and abroad set new standards for American literature.

After combing through more than a thousand sources, law historian Annette Gordon-Reed’s research confirmed Founding Father Thomas Jefferson’s long-suspected intimate relationship with the enslaved Sally Hemings, who bore Jefferson six children— and who herself came from a large family of men and women related by blood to Jefferson’s wife Martha. Her groundbreaking book The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2008.

[National Book Foundation]

[vintageanchorbooks]

"Yet the winner [of the National Book Award] in general nonfiction… was “All God’s Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw,” an oral history of an illiterate black Alabama sharecropper. Its author, the man who compiled it from extensive interviews, was a writer named Theodore Rosengarten.  Read the full article here: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/19/books/all-gods-dangers-a-forgotten-autobiography.html

Theodore Rosengarten’s award-winning book, All God’s Dangers, is available as an eBook: http://ow.ly/vZAaO. Nate Shaw’s father was born under slavery. Nate Shaw was born into a bondage that was only a little gentler. At the age of nine, he was picking cotton for thirty-five cents an hour. At the age of forty-seven, he faced down a crowd of white deputies who had come to confiscate a neighbor’s crop. His defiance cost him twelve years in prison. This triumphant autobiography, assembled from the eighty-four-year-old Shaw’s oral reminiscences, is the plain-spoken story of an “over-average” man who witnessed wrenching changes in the lives of Southern black people — and whose unassuming courage helped bring those changes about.