Necessary Trouble

In this thought-provoking memoir, Pulitzer Prize finalist Drew Gilpin Faust chronicles her coming-of-age in a Southern family and her growth into consciousness in postwar America.

To grow up in the 1950s was to enter a world transformed by warfare, by unspeakable examples of inhumanity, by nuclear threats, by polarized national alliances and by destabilized social hierarchies. Two wars and the Depression that connected them had unleashed a torrent of expectations and dissatisfactions-not only on a global stage for nations and peoples, but also in very personal and domestic domains.

To grow up a little white girl in conservative, segregated Virginia was to be expected to adopt a willful blindness to the cruelties of race and the constraints of gender. For young Drew Gilpin, the acceptance of a combination of racial privilege and female subordination proved both intolerable and galvanizing. Urged to be "well adjusted' and to fill the role of well-mannered lady that her upbringing had defined, she would instead find resistance to be the necessary price of her survival. During the sixties, in her love of learning and education, in her active engagement in the civil rights, student and anti-war movements, Faust, who would become an award-winning historian and the first woman president of Harvard University, forged a path to a different future.

A portrait of both an era and a remarkable life, Necessary Trouble: Growing Up at Midcentury captures a time of rapid change and fierce reaction, the changes and aftershocks of which we continue to grapple with today.

Includes black-and-white images