The author's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is the story of four generations in the life of an American family. Lyman Ward, a retired professor of history and author of books about the Western frontier, returns to his ancestral home of Grass Valley, California, in the Sierra Nevada mountains. Wheelchair bound with a crippling bone disease and dependent on others for his every need, he is nonetheless embarking on a search of monumental proportions: to...

Madam C. J. Walker--reputed to be Americas first self-made woman millionaire--has long been celebrated for her rags-to-riches story. Born to former slaves in the Louisiana Delta in the aftermath of the Civil War, married at fourteen, and widowed at twenty, Walker spent the first decades of her life as a laundress, laboring in conditions that paralleled the lives of countless poor and working-class African American women. By the time of her death in...

As a child, Laura Ingalls Wilder traveled across the prairie in a covered wagon. Her daughter, Rose, thought those stories might make a good book, and the two created the beloved Little House series. Sarah Breedlove, the daughter of former slaves, wanted everything to be different for her own daughter, A'Lelia. Together they built a million-dollar beauty empire for women of color. Marie Curie became the first person in history to win two Nobel prizes...

Bundles, a journalist and great-great-granddaughter of Madam C.J. Walker, offers a lively portrait of an American businesswoman. Walker, the first freeborn child of slaves, rose from poverty to establish a successful hair-care business, became one of the wealthiest women in the U.S., and devoted herself to a life of activism and philanthropy toward race and women's issues. photo insert.