Reluctant Activist: The Spiritual Life and Art of John Howard Griffin - Softcover

Bonazzi, Robert

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0875656668 ISBN 13: 9780875656663

Publisher: TCU Press, 2018

Synopsis

This authorized biography by Robert Bonazzi, executor for the estate of John Howard Griffin (1920–1980), is based upon Griffin’s Journals from 1950–1980. Griffin was blinded in the South Seas during WW II, but regained sight in 1957, after which he wrote the classic Black Like Me (Houghton Mifflin, 1961), now translated into sixteen languages.

During a decade of blindness, Griffin published two novels and many short stories. His third novel, Street of the Seven Angels, was published posthumously by Wings Press (2003). The first two novels, The Devil Rides Outside (a banned best seller that was adjudicated by the Supreme Court not to be pornographic) and Nuni are Wings Press e-books, as is a fiftieth anniversary cloth edition of Black Like Me.

Griffin’s Encounters with the Other (1997) and Follow the Ecstasy, about Thomas Merton’s last years (1983), were published posthumously by Latitudes Press; Follow the Ecstasy: The Hermitage Years of Thomas Merton (1993) and Scattered Shadows: A Memoir of Blindness and Vision (2004) appeared posthumously from Orbis Books.

Author Robert Bonazzi follows Griffin year by year after 1961, when Griffin toured the globe as a lecturer on human rights. In addition to Griffin’s Journals, Bonazzi’s sources include Scattered Shadows, interviews with Studs Terkel, Mike Wallace, and other sources, plus the witness of Griffin’s widow Elizabeth Griffin-Bonazzi. The author completes Griffin’s story with Griffin’s photographic portraits of Thomas Merton, among many others, and his musicological essays.

About this title

About the Author

Author of Man in the Mirror: The Story of Black Like Me (Orbis, 1997), ROBERT BONAZZI also wrote the afterword for the Penguin edition of Black Like Me. His books include Awakened by Surprise (fiction, Lamar University Literary Press, 2016), Outside the Margins (literary essays, Wings, 2015), plus five books of poetry, most recently The Scribbling Cure (Pecan Grove Press, 2012). He lives in San Antonio.

Edition details

• Publisher: TCU Press
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 0875656668
• ISBN 13: 9780875656663
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 446