Book Synopsis A native South Carolinian, Marshall Frady was a journalist for over twenty-five years, writing principally on political figures and racial and social tensions in the American culture, first as a correspondent for Newsweek , then for Life , Harpers , Esquire , The New York Review of Books , The Sunday Times of London , Atlantic Monthly , and The New Yorker . In the 1980s, Frady was chief writer and host of ABC News Documentary Series Closeup, for which he won two Emmys, the Cine Golden Eagle, and the duPont-Columbia Award, and a correspondent for Nightline. In the 90s, he co-wrote the screenplay for the TNT miniseries George Wallace, directed by John Frankenheimer, which won three CableACE awards, a Golden Globe for best miniseries, the Humanitas Award for writing, three Emmy awards and the Peabody Award. He also wrote and narrated the PBS Frontline Documentary, The Pilgrimage of Jesse Jackson. He was the author of seven books: Wallace (1968), Across a Darkling Plain: An Americans Passage Through the Middle East (1971), Billy Graham: A Parable of American Righteousness (1979), Southerners: A Journalists Odyssey (1980), which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, Jesse: The Life and Pilgrimage of Jesse Jackson (1996), and Martin Luther King Jr. (2002), a volume in the Penguin Lives series. He died on March 9, 2004. Review Quotes Astonishing . . . as subtle and perceptive a portrait as any black writer could have produced of one of the most complex public figures of our times . . . Frady provides such a full-bodied portrait of this awesomely gifted but equally flawed man that it should provoke a repositioning of Jacksons place in history. -- Time Frady has delivered a thoroughly researched, at times poetically written profile of a towering public man. -- The Washington Times Fradys . . . biography of Jesse Jackson, perhaps our eras most spellbinding political preacher, [is] hugely useful in the way [it lays] out for our inspection the split personality of this nation. Frady is one of the best political biographers of our time. -- Robert Sherrill, Los Angeles Times Never before has the Jackson gravitas been captured with such brio, honesty, shrewdness and big-heartedness as Frady brings forth in his mesmerizing book. -- The Boston Globe What makes this galvanic, richly variegated, novelistic biography ring so true is that Frady . . . manages to balance societys shortcomings with Jacksons own. . . . Fradys biography comes off as voluble and dynamic as Jackson himself. -- Entertainment Weekly