A Hungry Heart: A Memoir

In A Hungry Heart, Parks reflects on the people and events that shaped him: from growing up poor on the Kansas prairie to crisscrossing the country on the North Coast Limited; documenting poverty and injustice in Chicago to doing fashion spreads for Vogue; photographing black revolutionaries to writing, composing the soundtrack for, and directing the Hollywood movie version of his novel The Learning Tree. More than a self-portrait of the artist, A Hungry Heart is a striking account of an American era.

Legendary American renaissance man Gordon Parks once again reflects on his amazing professional and personal accomplishments, now in the tenth decade of this extraordinary life.

The New York Times - John Wranovics

A Hungry Heart, in addition to being a testimony to Parks's wit, sensitivities and vast armory of talents, is a treatise on the value of encouragement. The miracle of his life is what he's achieved with the opportunities he was given. In 1952, the conductor Dean Dixon, having premiered Parks's "Symphonic Set for Piano and Orchestra" in the courtyard of the Doge's Palace in Venice, told Time magazine: "We should hear more from Gordon Parks." Happily, we have again.

Gordon Parks's retrospective book of art photography, Half Past Autumn, published in 1997, coincided with an exhibition organized by the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., which traveled in the United States from that year until 2003, and an HBO documentary that aired on November 30, 2000. He has authored numerous books of art, fiction, memoir (including A Star for Noon), photographs, and a CD of his music (2000). He published The Learning Tree, a novel, in 1963, and three previous autobiographies, A Choice of Weapons, To Smile in Autumn, and Voices in the Mirror. He died in March 2006 at his home in Manhattan. He was 93.