Diane McWhorter

Rebecca Diane McWhorter is an Pulitzer-prize winning author and journalist.

McWhorter was born in Tupelo, Mississippi to Martin and Elizabeth Gore Biggs McWhorter, who moved to Birmingham when Diane was 5. She grew up in Mountain Brook and attended the Brook Hill School and graduated from the Altamont School in 1970.

McWhorter then graduated from Wellesley College in Massachusetts and got a job as a writer for a magazine in Boston. From 1982 to 2001 she researched and wrote about the forces seeking to challenge the Civil Rights movement in Birmingham and the events leading up to the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church. She took special interest in learning about the roles her own family members may have played in Birmingham's defining drama. The result was a broad-reaching and incisive narrative which pulled together her years of research and interviews with personal experience. Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama--The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution was published in 2001 and won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 2002.

McWhorter married fellow author Richard Rosen in 1987 and has two children.

In 2007 she served as a Holtzbrinck Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin.

Publications

• McWhorter, Diane (2001) Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama--The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution. New York: Simon & Schuster
• McWhorter, Diane (2004) A Dream of Freedom. New York: Scholastic

References

• Applebome, Peter (March 18, 2001) "The Other Side of the Mountain". New York Times.