Wright Thompson grew up in the Mississippi Delta, just a few dozen miles from the place of Emmett Till's murder. His 2021 article in the Atlantic, 'His Name Is Emmett Till', led to nationwide calls for a memorial at the site. The New York Times bestselling author of Pappyland and The Cost of These Dreams, he lives in Oxford, Mississippi with his family.
With a passion for truth and justice, and a fierce determination to dig for the secrets, Wright Thompson has produced an incredible history of a crime that changed America. -- JOHN GRISHAM The most brutal, layered and absolutely beautiful book about Mississippi, and really how the world conspired with the best and worst parts of Mississippi, I will ever read . . . Every generation you get a few writers with the engine of a 747 and the skill of a wizard. We see it in Ward, Wright, Faulkner and Trethewey. And that finely crafted motor is on full display in this work by Wright Thompson. The Barn is the new standard in research and book-making. -- KIESE LAYMON, author of Heavy: An American Memoir In this important, diligently researched, and beautifully rendered story, Wright Thompson takes up one of the most consequential and tragic events of the twentieth century, the murder of Emmett Till, in the place where it happened. The land, the people, and circumstance are vivid on every page. With integrity, and soul, Thompson unearths the terrible how and why, carrying us back and forth through time, deep in Mississippi - baring, sweat, soil, and heart all the way through. Most of all, Thompson teaches us that history is the most important ghost story there is to tell, and that we - the haunted - must be healed. -- IMANI PERRY