Robert J. Norrell

Robert J. Norrell

ROBERT J. NORRELL is a native of Hazel Green, Alabama. He holds the Bernadotte Schmitt Chair of Excellence at the University of Tennessee. After earning a BA and PhD at the University of Virginia, Norrell taught at Birmingham-Southern College and the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. His 2009 biography, Up from History: the Life of Booker T. Washington, was received with national acclaim. In 2005 he published a well-reviewed interpretation of US race relations, The House I Live In: Race in the American Century. His Reaping the Whirlwind: The Civil Rights Movement in Tuskegee won the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award in 1986. He is the author of seven additional books and twenty scholarly articles. Eden Rise is his first work of fiction.