Chasing America: Notes from a Rock 'n' Soul Integrationist

Product Description"And I thought I knew this crazy-brave black boy who bolted out of a Harlem ghetto into a white prep school and bobbed and weaved his way across the treacherous divide between black and white America. But Dennis Watlington's life story is even more astonishing than I knew. He emerges a no-jive black integrationist who is proud of the slave ancestry that makes him a solid American foreperson." -Gail Sheehy, bestselling author of Passages and Understanding Men's PassagesChasing America is a rollercoaster ride through promise and poverty, affirmative action and addiction, and a powerful story that captures a life and an era that is seminally American.Born in Harlem in 1952, Dennis developed a heroin habit at the age of 14, kicked it, and received a scholarship to the Hotchkiss School where he was elected president of his class. He went on to NYU, became involved in film and theater (he had a small role in The Deerhunter and gave Bruce Willis his start in a play called Bullpen), got addicted to crack, kicked that, and became an Emmy winning television writer.Chasing America shows us the best and worst that America offers to a Black man--from the Jim Crow South to boarding school life in New England to backstage at the Fillmore East to a holding cell in Bellevue Hospital.Part Ellison, part Exley, Chasing America is an amazing story.From Publishers WeeklyWatlington was a poor African-American boy in LBJ-era New York City whose intellectual acuity landed him scholarships to several prestigious prep school programs as the "token Negro," including the Hotchkiss School in Connecticut. But the street lured him back; he became addicted to heroin at 13, was in gangs at 15 and incarcerated at 17. Later he was tempted by alcohol and crack cocaine. Watlington's healing came through acting, teaching and knowing the right women: his first wife, African-American actress Gerri Griffin; their daughter, Avery; his Caucasian wife of the past two decades, Anne; the Oscar-winning documentarian Barbara Kopple; and his lifelong friend, Gail Sheehy, who'd written about him when he was at Hotchkiss. Watlington views his childhood, adolescence and rise as a television writer and screenwriter through the scrim of racism. His tale is remarkable, if incomplete (his father and siblings are rarely mentioned, his mother appears only as a vicious harridan, he never explains why he chooses drugs and crime, he glosses over his successes), and the overabundance of colloquial slang and the excessive use of "nigger" make for hard going. Nevertheless, it's a compelling story of one man's struggle to define his place as a black man in white America. (Feb. 15)Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.From the Inside Flap"And I thought I knew this crazy-brave black boy who bolted out of a Harlem ghetto into a white prep school and bobbed and weaved his way across the treacherous divide between black and white America. But Dennis Watlington's life story is even more astonishing than I knew. He emerges a no-jive black integrationist who is proud of the slave ancestry that makes him a solid American foreperson." Gail Sheehy, bestselling author of Passages and Understanding Men's PassagesChasing America is a rollercoaster ride through promise and poverty, affirmative action and addiction, and a powerful story that captures a life and an era that is seminally American.Born in Harlem in 1952, Dennis developed a heroin habit at the age of 14, kicked it, and received a scholarship to the Hotchkiss School where he was elected president of his class. He went on to NYU, became involved in film and theater (he had a small role in The Deerhunter and gave Bruce Willis his start in a play called Bullpen), got addicted to crack, kicked that, and became an Emmy winning television writer.Chasing America shows us the best and worst that America offers to a Black manfrom the Jim Crow South to boarding sc
Author: Watlington, Dennis

Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books

Binding: Hardcover

Language: English

ISBN-10: 0312271891

ISBN-13: 9780312271893