Westfall Politics & History Series Presents Award-Winning Author Paul Hendrickson
St. Louis County Library Foundation and the JCC of St. Louis are pleased to host an SLCL Authors @ the J event with acclaimed non-fiction author and journalist Paul Hendrickson for a discussion and signing of “Fighting the Night: Iwo Jima, World War II, and a Flyer’s Life.” The event is presented by St. Louis County Library’s Westfall Politics and History Series.
The event will take place on Thursday, May 30, at 7:00 p.m. at the JCC’s Staenberg Family Center – Mirowitz Performing Arts Center, 2 Millstone Campus Drive, St. Louis, MO 63146.
The program is free and open to the public. Books will be available for purchase at the event from Left Bank Books
Bestselling author Paul Hendrickson presents the profoundly moving story of his father’s wartime service as a night fighter pilot, and the prices he and his fellow soldiers paid for their acts of selfless, patriotic sacrifice
In the fall of 1944, Joe Paul Hendrickson, the author’s father, kissed his twenty-one-year-old wife and two baby children goodbye. The 25-year-old first lieutenant, pilot of a famed P-61 Black Widow, was leaving for the war. He and his night fighter squadron were sent to Iwo Jima, where, for the last five and a half months of World War II, he flew approximately 75 missions, largely in pitch-black conditions. His wife would wait out the war at the home of her small-town Ohio parents, one of the countless numbers of American family members shouldering the burden of being left behind.
As Paul Hendrickson tracks his parents’ journey, together and separate, both stateside and overseas, he creates a vivid portrait of a hard-to-know father whose time in the war was truly heroic, but never without its hidden and unhidden psychic costs.
Bringing to life an iconic moment of American history, and the tragedy of all wars, “Fighting the Night” is an intense and powerful story of violence and love, forgiveness and loss. And it is a tribute to those who got plunged into service, in the best years of their lives, and the sacrifices they and their loved ones made, then and thereafter.
PAUL HENDRICKSON is a three-time finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and a winner in 2003 for his book “Sons of Mississippi.” “The Living and the Dead: Robert McNamara and Five Lives of a Lost War” was a 1996 finalist for the National Book Award. “Hemingway’s Boat” was a New York Times bestseller. He has been the recipient of writing fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Since 1998, he has been on the faculty of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Pennsylvania, and for two decades before that, he was a staff writer at The Washington Post.
Program sites are accessible. With at least two weeks' notice, accommodations will be made for persons with disabilities. Call 314-994-3300 or contact us.