Background
Griffin was born on June 16, 1920 in Dallas, Texas, the son of Jack Walter Griffin, a whole-sale grocery salesman, and Lena Mae Young, a musician; he was the second of four children.
(By the Author of the famous "Black Like Me")
By the Author of the famous "Black Like Me"
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(Thomas Merton aimed for the image that was true to its su...)
Thomas Merton aimed for the image that was true to its subject and that had the mysterious ability to communicate fresh insights into it.
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(Once the home of the buffalo, the mustang and the lordly ...)
Once the home of the buffalo, the mustang and the lordly Comanche, the Midland Country of West Texas has been the site of human drama on a large and often violent scale. When the Anglo-Texans, after years of bloody conflict, finally wrested the land from the Indians, the high flat prairies became the home of cowboys and ranchers with their carefully-bred cattle. Midland was the school center for the area. Great ranches developed and the town became a cattle-shipping center. Later, with the discovery of oil the little cowtown grew into a cosmopolitan city - center of the immense Permian Basin oil empire. Mr. Griffin presents not only a chronological history, but detailed accounts of the daily life, foods and customs of the various periods and of the civilizations that have inhabited the area. The reader crosses the Plains with Marcy in 1849 and experiences the murder and scalping of Lieutenant Harrison by the Indians. He participates in setting up a Comanche Camp at Mustang Springs. He goes on the first cattle drives across the hostile Plains, witnesses the Indian attack against Oliver Loving and later he winters alone with a cowboy at an isolated little camp, or comes into the growing cowtown to help the men take in some tenderfeet with the badger game. He hears the sounds of the cowtown in its festive and tragic moods. He watches the town fight to grow, to remain high class and to prosper. And finally, he witnesses the dramatic revolution brought on by the discovery of oil, the transformation that occurs with sudden great growth and the manner in which the cattlemen and oil solved the problems of rapid expansion. This is an epic of the land and of its effects, good and bad, on the people, and of their effects, good and bad, on it.
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(The two greatest novels of the past decade are William Fa...)
The two greatest novels of the past decade are William Faulkner's A Fable and John Howard Griffin's Nuni. After John Howard Griffin's escape from Nazi-occupied France, he was stationed as an isolated observer in the Solomon Islands. That experience led to his second novel in 1956, Nuni. As in his first novel, The Devil Rides Outside, and later in Black Like Me, the author encounters "the Other." In Nuni, that reality is a "primitive," almost Neolithic society. The main character learns to cope, not so much in terms of survival as in finding a new meaning to his life. The Chicago Tribune described Nuni as an extraordinarily interesting account of a white man's life in a savage island village of the Pacific. The greater part of the novel is concerned with the growth in the narrator, a knowledge of as well as affection for the curiously innocent people. In Nuni, Griffin pushes his exploration of the self even further. An English professor is abruptly thrust into a primitive pre-intellectual society on a Pacific island where his masks and roles mean nothing. It is a kind of derisive reversal of the Robinson Crusoe plot, where man conquers his environment because he is a product of Western civilization, and hence superior. Here in Nuni, he is peeled of his layers: professor, father, husband, civilized man, superficial Catholic. Finally we have the essential man, at the frontiers of self. In the process of this sloughing off of the accretions of his world, he loses other attributes of fear, pride, nostalgia, sentiment, selfishness. Reduced to extremities, rendered in the fire of his ordeal, the professor rises above the murk of his elemental level to a new, freshened view of his life's meaning. And it is in Nuni that Griffin reaches the frontiers of realism.
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( On October 28, 1959, John Howard Griffin underwent a tr...)
On October 28, 1959, John Howard Griffin underwent a transformation that changed many lives beyond his own—he made his skin black and traveled through the segregated Deep South. His odyssey of discovery was captured in journal entries, arguably the single most important documentation of 20th-century American racism ever written. More than 50 years later, this newly edited edition—which is based on the original manuscript and includes a new design and added afterword—gives fresh life to what is still considered a “contemporary book.” The story that earned respect from civil rights leaders and death threats from many others endures today as one of the great human—and humanitarian—documents of the era. In this new century, when terrorism is too often defined in terms of a single ethnic designation or religion, and the first black president of the United States is subject to hateful slurs, this record serves as a reminder that America has been blinded by fear and racial intolerance before. This is the story of a man who opened his eyes and helped an entire nation to do likewise.
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(This extraordinary chronicle from the author of "Black Li...)
This extraordinary chronicle from the author of "Black Like Me about his loss of sight is a powerful testament to the human spirit.
https://www.amazon.com/Scattered-Shadows-Memoir-Blindness-Vision/dp/1570755396?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=1570755396
(The author of Black Like Me takes readers inside the worl...)
The author of Black Like Me takes readers inside the world of Thomas Merton, presenting an intimate look at the last critical years of his life--the period that coincided with the monk's long-sought permission to withdraw to a hermitage on the monastery grounds of Gethsemani. This edition includes a rare selection of Griffin's photographs of Merton and his hermitage.
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(THE HISTORY-MAKING CLASSIC ABOUT CROSSING THE COLOR LINE ...)
THE HISTORY-MAKING CLASSIC ABOUT CROSSING THE COLOR LINE IN AMERICA'S SEGREGATED SOUTH “One of the deepest, most penetrating documents yet set down on the racial question.”—Atlanta Journal & Constitution In the Deep South of the 1950’s, a color line was etched in blood across Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia. Journalist John Howard Griffin decided to cross that line. Using medication that darkened his skin to deep brown, he exchanged his privileged life as a Southern white man for the disenfranchised world of an unemployed black man. What happened to John Howard Griffin—from the outside and within himself—as he made his way through the segregated Deep South is recorded in this searing work of nonfiction. His audacious, still chillingly relevant eyewitness history is a work about race and humanity every American must read. With an Epilogue by the author and an Afterword by Robert Bonazzi
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Griffin was born on June 16, 1920 in Dallas, Texas, the son of Jack Walter Griffin, a whole-sale grocery salesman, and Lena Mae Young, a musician; he was the second of four children.
At the age of fifteen, Griffin responded to an advertisement for the Lycée Descartes, a boarding school in France, and requested admission. He stated that he had no money to pay fees but would do almost any type of work if he were admitted. The school accepted his offer. After graduating from the lycée, Griffin remained in France to study medicine and the humanities. When France was conquered by Germany in 1940, he abandoned his studies and took part in the French resistance movement. Having abandoned his study of medicine, Griffin turned to musicology.
Griffin returned to the United States, enlisted in the United States Army, and was sent to the South Pacific. There he became involved in a United States government project to prepare Pacific islanders for the possibility of American occupation; his job was to gain the trust of the natives. During his stay in the South Pacific, Griffin's vision began to fail after an artillery attack during which he was knocked unconscious. His discharge papers indicated that his vision was 20/200, which meant that he was legally blind. In 1946 he spent several months in a Dominican monastery with a friend who was a monk. In later years he retreated to a monastery in difficult times. By 1947, Griffin was totally blind and abandoned all hope of an academic career, deciding instead to raise hogs. A major turning point in his life came when he met the drama critic John Mason Brown, who suggested he become a writer. Griffin's subsequent novel, The Devil Rides Outside (1952), dealt with the struggle between faith and temptation. Although the book was banned in Detroit as being too sexually explicit, it received many positive critical reviews. In the fall of 1952 he was diagnosed with malaria and was soon confined to a wheelchair, paralyzed in all but his left arm. Griffin also was found to have diabetes. In spite of these devastating physical setbacks, his second novel, Nuni, was published in 1956. By the time of its publication he had fully recovered from the malaria. In June 1957 Griffin's sight suddenly returned. Many people speculated that he had never really been blind; Time magazine suggested that his blindness had been hysterical. After regaining his sight Griffin became a staff reporter for Sepia, a black monthly magazine patterned on Life magazine. One of his undertakings for Sepia was a survey in November 1959, investigating the high suicide rate among southern blacks. In order to understand their plight, Griffin decided to "become" black. He flew to New Orleans and found a dermatologist who prescribed Oxsoralen, coupled with exposure to a sun lamp, to produce the desired change in complexion. He recorded his experiences first in Sepia and then in a book, Black Like Me (1961), that became a best-seller. Griffin was threatened and hanged in effigy by some of his white neighbors. In 1964 Black Like Me was made into a movie that was less successful than the book. His experiences led him to become an activist in the civil rights movement and his next book, The Church and the Black Man (1969), was a criticism of the way the Christian faith related to African Americans. After the death in 1968 of Thomas Merton (author of The Seven Storey Mountain), Griffin was asked by the Merton Legacy Trust to write Merton's biography. He worked for nine years on this project but was forced to give it up because of poor health. Griffin died on September 9, 1980, after suffering two years from kidney disease, lung congestion, heart attacks, and the amputation of a leg.
(The author of Black Like Me takes readers inside the worl...)
( On October 28, 1959, John Howard Griffin underwent a tr...)
(THE HISTORY-MAKING CLASSIC ABOUT CROSSING THE COLOR LINE ...)
(Once the home of the buffalo, the mustang and the lordly ...)
(Thomas Merton aimed for the image that was true to its su...)
(This extraordinary chronicle from the author of "Black Li...)
(The two greatest novels of the past decade are William Fa...)
(By the Author of the famous "Black Like Me")
In June 1952, Griffin married one of his former piano students, Elizabeth ("Piedy") Holland; they had four children.