Isabel Wilkerson Tonight at Page Hall 11/15 8PM

Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, a sharecropper's wife, fled Mississippi in fear for her life after a relative was falsely accused of turkey stealing, and landed in Chicago in 1937.

George Swanson Starling, a Florida citrus picker who was threatened with a lynching after trying to organize fellow pickers, ended up in Harlem in 1945.

Dr. Robert Joseph Pershing Foster headed west to Los Angeles from Monroe, La., in 1953, frustrated that he was not permitted in most operating rooms in the South, despite his success as an Army surgeon.

This trio of protagonists formed the foundation of Isabel Wilkerson's extraordinary accomplishment, "The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration," winner of the Chicago Tribune's Heartland Prize for nonfiction. The book's power resides not only in its intimate portraits, but also in its epic sweep, redolent of a great novel.

Read more in the Chicago Tribune.

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