Wil Haygood on Beloved, The Power Broker, and To Kill a Mockingbird

Welcome to the Book Marks Questionnaire, where we ask authors questions about the books that have shaped them.

This week, we spoke to the author of Colorization: One Hundred Years of Black Films in a White World, Wil Haygood.

Book Marks: First book you loved?

Will Haygood: Rockin’ Steady: A Guide to Basketball & Cool by Walt Frazier.

BM: Favorite re-read?

WH: Arna Bontemps-Langston Hughes Letters, 1925-1967, Edited by Charles H. Nichols.

BM: What book do you think your book is most in conversation with?

WH: Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson.

BM: A book that blew your mind?

WH: The Power Broker by Robert A. Caro.

BM: Last book you read?

WH: Razorback Tears by S. A. Cosby.

BM: What book from the past year would you like to give a shout out to?

WH: Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.

BM: A book that made you laugh out loud?

WH: Deacon King Kong by James McBride.

BM: A book that made you cry?

WH: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou.

BM: Book you wish you’d read as a teenager?

WH: To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee.

BM: Favorite book to give as a gift?

WH: Beloved by Toni Morrison.

BM: Book you wish would be adapted for a film/tv show?

WH: Winchell: Gossip, Power and the Culture of Celebrity by Neal Gabler.

Will Haygood is the author of Tigerland, which was a finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize; Showdown, a finalist for an NAACP Image Award; In Black and White; and The Butler, which was made into a film directed by Lee Daniels. He has been a correspondent for The Washington Post and The Boston Globe, where he was a Pulitzer finalist. Haygood is a Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow, and is currently Boadway Visiting Distinguished Scholar at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio.