Jonathan Kozol

Apart from his writings, he has also founded the non-profit organizations, ‘Cambridge Institute for Public Education’ and ‘Education Action!’

He presently lives with his dog, ‘Sweetie Pie’ in a homestead in Byfield, Massachusetts.

Jonathan Kozol was born in Boston, Massachusetts, into a traditional middle-class, Jewish family. His mother was a social worker and his father was a psychiatrist and neurologist.

He graduated from Noble and Greenough School in 1954 and went on to study English literature at Harvard University. He graduated from the university four years later.

He obtained a Rhodes scholarship to Magdalen College, Oxford, but chose not to complete it and instead, traveled to Paris, where he studied the art of fiction and non-fiction writing from William Styron and Richard Wright.

After he returned from Paris, he began to tutor children in Roxbury and became a teacher at the Boston Public Schools.

In 1967, he authored and published his first work, ‘Death at an Early Age: The Destruction of the Hearts and Minds of Negro Children in Boston Public Schools’. It went on to garner a lot of popularity for him. He was even honored with an award for this work.

After being fired from school for teaching a ‘Langston Hughes’ poem, he became deeply involved in the civil rights movement and began concentrating on writing more novels.

From 1972 to 1975, he published two more non-fiction novels, ‘Free Schools’ and ‘The Night is Dark and I am Far From Home’. These novels represented the inner workings of the American society back then and were also written from first-hand experiences.

In 1980, he authored ‘Prisoners of Silence: Breaking the Bonds of Adult Illiteracy in the United States’. Two years later, he penned ‘Alternative Schools: A Guide for Educators and Parents’.

His first publication, ‘Death at an Early Age’ was released in 1967. The book became extremely popular and won the US National Book Award. It also went on to sell more than two million copies.

‘The Shame of the Nation’, published in 2005, is regarded as one of his major works for the amount of research and preparation that went into creating the book. He visited nearly 60 schools around the United States while writing the book and also researched on the school’s expenditure for each child.