Fight of the Century

Writers Reflect on 100 Years of Landmark ACLU Cases

Salman Rushdie, Lauren Groff, Jennifer Egan, Scott Turow, Morgan Parker, Victor Lavalle, Michael Cunningham, Neil Gaiman, Jesmyn Ward, Moses Sumney, George Saunders, Marlon James, William Finnegan, Anthony Doerr, C.J. Anders, Brenda J. Childs, Andrew Sean Greer, Louise Erdrich, Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, Michael Cunningh, Michael Chabon, Ayelet Waldman

• Publisher: Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781501190414
• eBook ISBN:
  9781501190421
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Literature

The American Civil Liberties Union partners with award-winning authors Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman in this “forceful, beautifully written” (Associated Press) collection that brings together many of our greatest living writers, each contributing an original piece inspired by a historic ACLU case.

On January 19, 1920, a small group of idealists and visionaries, including Helen Keller, Jane Addams, Roger Baldwin, and Crystal Eastman, founded the American Civil Liberties Union. A century after its creation, the ACLU remains the nation’s premier defender of the rights and freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution.

In collaboration with the ACLU, authors Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman have curated an anthology of essays “full of struggle, emotion, fear, resilience, hope, and triumph” (Los Angeles Review of Books) about landmark cases in the organization’s one-hundred-year history. Fight of the Century takes you inside the trials and the stories that have shaped modern life. Some of the most prominent cases that the ACLU has been involved in—Brown v. Board of Education, Roe v. Wade, Miranda v. Arizona—need little introduction. Others you may never even have heard of, yet their outcomes quietly defined the world we live in now. Familiar or little-known, each case springs to vivid life in the hands of the acclaimed writers who dive into the history, narrate their personal experiences, and debate the questions at the heart of each issue.

Hector Tobar introduces us to Ernesto Miranda, the felon whose wrongful conviction inspired the now-iconic Miranda rights—which the police would later read to the man suspected of killing him. Yaa Gyasi confronts the legacy of Brown v. Board of Education, in which the ACLU submitted a friend of- the-court brief questioning why a nation that has sent men to the moon still has public schools so unequal that they may as well be on different planets. True to the ACLU’s spirit of principled dissent, Scott Turow offers a blistering critique of the ACLU’s stance on campaign finance.

These powerful stories, along with essays from Neil Gaiman, Meg Wolitzer, Salman Rushdie, Ann Patchett, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Louise Erdrich, George Saunders, and many more, remind us that the issues the ACLU has engaged over the past one hundred years remain as vital as ever today, and that we can never take our liberties for granted.

Chabon and Waldman are donating their advance to the ACLU and the contributors are forgoing payment.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Introduction
• Foreword
• No More Flags: Viet Thanh Nguyen
• Scottsboro, USA: Jacqueline Woodson
• The Dirtiest, Most Indecent, Obscene Thing Ever Written: Michael Chabon
• The Brother-in-Law: Ann Patchett
• Victory Formation: Brit Bennett
• The Nail: Steven Okazaki
• A Short Essay About Shorts: Daniel Handler
• They Talk Like That: Geraldine Brooks
• Rocket City: Yaa Gyasi
• One Will Be Provided for You: Sergio De La Pava
• Legal Counsel at the Moment Most Crucial: Dave Eggers
• How the First Amendment Finally Got Its Wings: Timothy Egan
• Your Mail Belongs to Us: Yiyun Li
• Protection: Meg Wolitzer
• Ernesto’s Prayer: Hector Tobar
• Loving: Aleksandar Hemon
• The Black Armband: Elizabeth Strout
• Crowd Work: Adrian Nicole LeBlanc
• The Right to Offend: Rabih Alameddine
• On Jews, Blacks, the KKK, Ohio, and Freedom of Speech: Moriel Rothman-Zecher
• Disturbing the War: Jonathan Lethem
• Secrets and Lies: Salman Rushdie
• The Ambivalent Activist, Jane Roe: Lauren Groff
• A Nondangerous Person: Ayelet Waldman
• Father Sues for “Mother’s Benefits”: Jennifer Egan
• Spending Money Isn’t Speech: Scott Turow
• Bob Jones Builds a Wall: Morgan Parker
• Some Gods Are Better Than Others: Victor LaValle
• Queer, Irish, Marching: Michael Cunningham
• “Because Girls Can Read as Well as Boys”: Neil Gaiman
• We Gather: Jesmyn Ward
• Stateside Statelessness: Moses Sumney
• The Way the Law Leads Us: George Saunders
• Live from the Bedroom: Marlon James
• Habeas, Guantánamo, and the Forever War: William Finnegan
• Who’s Your Villain?: Anthony Doerr
• You’ve Given Me a Lot to Think About: Charlie Jane Anders
• Relative Sovereignty: Brenda J. Child
• We Love You, Edie Windsor!: Andrew Sean Greer
• Surveillance Capitalism Versus Indigenous-Led Protest: Louise Erdrich
• Acknowledgments
• The Contributors
• About the Authors
• Copyright Credits
• Copyright