And All Our Wounds Forgiven: A Novel - Softcover

When John Calvin Marshall graduated from Harvard in 1956, he was prepared for a life of teaching and relative tranquility. But history had another plan for him: in the nascent civil rights movement of the 1960s, he became a leader and shining symbol of the new generation of blacks who were demanding their full rights as citizens. And All Our Wounds Forgiven is the story of John Calvin Marshall's brief, turbulent, and charismatic life, which ended-perhaps inevitably-in assassination. The novel is told in four alternating voices: that of John Calvin Marshall's wife, Andrea; of Lisa Adams, the young white woman who heard Marshall speak and fell under his spell, later becoming his trusted aide and passionate mistress; of Bobby Card, a black civil rights leader operating in the Heart of Darkness-the Deep South of the 1960s-as Marshall's chief lieutenant in the field; and finally, of Marshall himself. There are, too, leading figures of the time-Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, J. Edgar Hoover, Malcolm X-whose meetings and conversations with Marshall add insights and historical perspective to the unfolding events. Here, veteran author re-envisions the Martin Luther King story in fearful, exciting, and violent times. Political and provocative, And All Our Wounds Forgiven is most of all a moving and tender love story about one of this century's most charismatic black leaders and the two women he loved.

Julius Lester is the author of more than twenty works of fiction and nonfiction, including the best-selling Look Out, Whitey! Black Power's Gon' Get Your Mama and Do Lord Remember Me. Along with receiving numerous book awards, Lester has published critical writing in the New York Times, the Boston Globe, and the New Republic. Lester spent his childhood in Kansas and Tennessee. In 1963 he became deeply involved with the civil rights movement. He served on the faculty at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst-where he was awarded the Distinguished Teacher's Award, the Faculty Fellowship Award for Distinguished Research and Scholarship, and the Chancellor's Medal- until 2003, when he retired. He now resides with his wife in western Massachusetts.