American journalist and author; the first Black woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in journalism (1994, for her work as Chicago bureau chief of The New York Times) and the author of two of the most widely read works of serious American historical nonfiction published in the 21st century.
The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration (2010) is a fifteen-year work reconstructing the movement of roughly six million African Americans from the Jim Crow South to the cities of the North and West between 1915 and 1970. Wilkerson interviewed more than a thousand people and built the book around three composite protagonists — Ida Mae Gladney to Chicago, George Starling to Harlem, Robert Foster to Los Angeles — whose lives she followed in novelistic detail while setting them inside the structural forces that pressed them northward and shaped what they found. The result is the definitive narrative history of the Great Migration and one of the best-reviewed works of American nonfiction of its decade.
Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (2020) made a more controversial argument — that American racial hierarchy is better understood as a caste system, structurally analogous to Hindu caste and Nazi racial law, than as racism considered as prejudice or attitude. Wilkerson set out eight "pillars" of caste (divine/natural justification, heritability, endogamy, purity vs. pollution, occupational hierarchy, dehumanization, terror, inherent superiority/inferiority) and traced their operation across the three cases. Scholars have argued about whether caste is the right analytic; but the book's central intuition — that the American racial order is an inherited ranking system whose logic survives changes in law, ideology, and demography — reaches general readers in a way that academic arguments about structural racism typically do not.