In the New World

We first meet Larry Wright in 1960. He is thirteen and moving with his family to Dallas, the essential city of the New World just beginning to rise across the southern rim of the United States. As we follow him through the next two decades—the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, the devastating assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, Jr., the sexual revolution, the crisis of Watergate, and the emergence of Ronald Reagan—we relive the pivotal and shocking events of those crowded years.

Lawrence Wright has written the autobiography of a generation, giving back to us with stunning force the feelings of those turbulent times when the euphoria of Kennedy’s America would come to its shocking end. Filled with compassion and insight, In the New World is both the intimate tale of one man’s coming-of-age, and a universal story of the American experience of two crucial decades.

"An extraordinary book. . . . This is history without detachment, a memoir made universal. To read it is to relive the times." —Kansas City Star

"Wright remembers in a smoothly articulate style that takes us back into history in near novelistic fashion." —Chicago Sun-Times

"A wonderfully readable, thoroughly absorbing memoir of a twenty-five-year span of wrenching change." —The Philadelphia Inquirer

"Beautifully traces a young man's personal reckoning through the years of chaos in his homeland. In the New World succeeds because of its subtle interchange between memory and fact." —The Boston Globe