Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Howell Raines’ distinguished career in journalism includes serving as executive editor of the New York Times. His political commentary, reviews, and essays have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, and the New York Times, among other publications. In addition to the Pulitzer Prize, he has received the Clarence Cason Award in Nonfiction Writing and the National Press Foundation Award.
His latest book, Silent Cavalry: How Union Solders from Alabama Helped Sherman Burn Atlanta and then Got Written Out of History” brings to light the conspiracy that sought to undermine the accomplishments of the First Alabama Cavalry USA, a band of more than 2,000 renegade Alabama farmers who fought for the Union. The book exposes the tangled web of how its wartime accomplishments were silenced, implicating everyone from a former Confederate general to a gaggle of Lost Cause historians in the Ivy League.
Raines has also been a writer of fiction, nonfiction, and memoir. His novels include Whiskey Man, Fly Fishing Through the Midlife Crisis, The One That Got Away and “My Soul Is Rested: Movement Days in the Deep South Remembered”, an acclaimed oral history of the civil rights movement. Raines was awarded a Pulitzer in Feature Writing for “Grady’s Gift,” a personal reflection published in the New York Times Magazine, describing his deep friendship with Grady Hutchinson, a Black housekeeper who worked for his family during the era of segregation.
