Read and discuss literature with our Nordic Book Club Online! Nordic Book Club meets monthly via Zoom to discuss contemporary literature in translation. On July 14 we’ll discuss:
The Remarkable Life of Reed Peggram by Ethelene Whitmire

The Remarkable Life of Reed Peggram: The Man Who Stared Down World War II in the Name of Love is dramatic and heartrending true story of one remarkable young man’s account of love in the time of war by a celebrated historian of untold Black stories

On the eve of World War II, a handsome young scholar arrived in Paris. The queer, Black son of a housecleaner, who had nevertheless been decorated in the halls of Harvard and Columbia, Reed Peggram flirted with Leonard Bernstein, sat for portraits by famous artists, charmed minor royalty and became like a little brother to famed researcher and writer Jan Gay. Finally in Europe and on the same prestigious scholarship as literary luminaries Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes before him, he ignored the increasingly alarmed calls to return home to a repressive, segregated America and a constrained life as a second class citizen. And as tensions grew and gas masks were distributed in the City of Lights, Reed turned instead to the new life he’d made: with Arne, a tall and dashing Danish scholar with whom he had formed a deep bond.

Award-winning historian Ethelene Whitmire (an ASF Fellow and the curator of our 2024-25 exhibition Nordic Utopia? African Americans in the 20th Century) unearthed a trove of Reed’s letters when she met one of his descendants at a lecture, awed that she’d heard so little of this charismatic man and his fascinating true story of love and war. In The Remarkable Life of Reed Peggram, she introduces us to an unforgettable character who fled from country to country as fighting advanced, was captured by Nazis and outwitted them in a daring escape, and risked it all in a personal fight for a life of love, freedom, beauty and dignity in a world set against him.

The Remarkable Life of Reed Peggram is available in hardback, ebook and audio from Penguin Random House and various other retailers.