Titles by Patrick Parr

One Week in America is a day-by-day narrative of the 1968 Notre Dame Sophomore Literary Festival and the national events that grabbed the spotlight. Dealing with the anti–Vietnam War movement, Lyndon B. Johnson’s decision not to seek re-election, and the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., author Patrick Parr takes readers back to one chaotic week on the Notre Dame campus, when college students, talented authors, and presidential candidates grappled with major events, creating one of the most  historic festivals of the twentieth century. The major players in this story are names that just about every household in the United States had heard of before. Those who weren’t interested in William F. Buckley Jr. may have enjoyed Norman Mailer. Voters frustrated with Lyndon B. Johnson had turned their attention to Robert Kennedy, Eugene McCarthy, or Martin Luther King Jr. The disaffected youth who believed it was all noise, madness, and lunacy, clung to novelists Joseph Heller and Kurt Vonnegut. And those who preferred steady, practical, understated voices read the works of Granville Hicks and Wright Morris. For those disconnected from America, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man was there for empathy and inspiration. And yet, this luminary-filled literature festival started with a budget of $2.72. It was only through the thrilling efforts of festival chairman John E. Mroz and a hodgepodge of Notre Dame sophomores that such an event took place. Thanks to them, sixties politics and literature converged amid the chaos of a changing nation.

Martin Luther King Jr. was a cautious 19-year-old rookie preacher when he left Atlanta, Georgia, to attend divinity school up north. At Crozer Theological Seminary, King, or “ML” back then, immediately found himself surrounded by a white staff and white professors. Even his dorm room had once been used by wounded Confederate soldiers during the Civil War. Young ML was a prankster and a late-night, chain-smoking pool player who fell in love with a white woman while facing discrimination from locals in the surrounding town of Chester, Pennsylvania. In class, ML performed well, though he demonstrated a habit of plagiarizing that continued throughout his academic career. In his three years at Crozer between 1948 and 1951, King delivered dozens of sermons around the Philadelphia area, had a gun pointed at him (twice) and eventually became student body president. These experiences shaped him into a man ready to take on even greater challenges. The Seminarian is the first definitive, full-length account of King’s years as a divinity student at Crozer Theological Seminary. Long passed over by biographers and historians, this period in King’s life is vital to understanding the historical figure he soon became.