by Viet Thanh Nguyen (Author), Jacqueline woodson (Author), Ann Patchett (Author), Brit Bennett (Author), Steven Okazaki (Author), David Handler (Author), Geraldine Brooks (Author), Yaa Gyasi (Author), Sergio De La Pava (Author), Dave Eggers (Author), Timothy Egan (Author), Li Yiyun (Author), Meg Wolitzer (Author), Hector Tobar (Author), Aleksandar Hemon (Author), Elizabeth Strout (Author), Rabih Alameddine (Author), Moriel Rothman-Zecher (Author), Jonathan Lethem (Author), Salman Rushdie (Author), Lauren Groff (Author), Jennifer Egan (Author), Scott Turow (Author), Morgan Parker (Author), Victor Lavalle (Author), Michael Cunningham (Author), Neil Gaiman (Author), Jesmyn Ward (Author), Moses Sumney (Author), George Saunders (Author), Marlon James (Author), William Finnegan (Author), Anthony Doerr (Author), C.J. Anders (Author), Brenda J. Childs (Author), Andrew Sean Greer (Author), Louise Erdrich (Author), Adrian Nicole LeBlanc (Author), Michael Chabon (Editor), Ayelet Waldman (Editor), Dave Cole (Foreword)
To mark its 100-year anniversary, the American Civil Liberties Union
partners with award-winning authors Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman to
bring together many of our greatest living writers, each contributing
an original piece inspired by a historic ACLU case.
On
January 19, 1920, a small group of idealists and visionaries, including
Helen Keller, Jane Addams, Roger Baldwin, and Crystal Eastman, founded
the American Civil Liberties Union. A century after its creation, the
ACLU remains the nation’s premier defender of the rights and freedoms
guaranteed by the Constitution.
In collaboration with the ACLU,
authors Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman have curated an anthology of
essays about landmark cases in the organization’s one-hundred-year
history. Fight of the Century takes you inside the trials and the
stories that have shaped modern life. Some of the most prominent cases
that the ACLU has been involved in—Brown v. Board of Education, Roe v. Wade, Miranda v. Arizona—need
little introduction. Others you may never even have heard of, yet their
outcomes quietly defined the world we live in now. Familiar or
little-known, each case springs to vivid life in the hands of the
acclaimed writers who dive into the history, narrate their personal
experiences, and debate the questions at the heart of each issue.
Hector
Tobar introduces us to Ernesto Miranda, the felon whose wrongful
conviction inspired the now-iconic Miranda rights—which the police would
later read to the man suspected of killing him. Yaa Gyasi confronts the
legacy of Brown v. Board of Education, in which the ACLU
submitted a friend of- the-court brief questioning why a nation that has
sent men to the moon still has public schools so unequal that they may
as well be on different planets. True to the ACLU’s spirit of principled
dissent, Scott Turow offers a blistering critique of the ACLU’s stance
on campaign finance.
These powerful stories, along with essays
from Neil Gaiman, Meg Wolitzer, Salman Rushdie, Ann Patchett, Viet Thanh
Nguyen, Louise Erdrich, George Saunders, and many more, remind us that
the issues the ACLU has engaged over the past one hundred years remain
as vital as ever today, and that we can never take our liberties for
granted.
Chabon and Waldman are donating their advance to the ACLU and the contributors are forgoing payment.
