James McBride

Biography

James McBride was born in 1957 in New York City, the eighth of twelve children of Andrew Dennis McBride (who died young) and Ruth McBride Jordan. He grew up in Red Hook, Brooklyn, and later Louisville Gardens in Harlem. He studied music at Oberlin College, earned a master's in journalism from Columbia University, and worked as a journalist and musician before writing The Color of Water in 1996. The book was conceived as a tribute to his mother and as an attempt to understand her silence about her past. It became a number-one New York Times bestseller and spent two years on the list. McBride went on to write The Good Lord Bird (2013), which won the National Book Award for Fiction.

James McBride at a glance