Farewell To Manzanar
By Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James D. Houston
Published in 1973, the book tells the story of a Japanese-American family who were uprooted from their home and sent to live at Manzanar (California) internment camp in 1942.
Reader's guide for Farewell To Manzanar
On 19 February 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order
9066, a military mandate that led to the internment of over 110,000 Japanese
Americans in camps located in California, Arizona, Utah, Idaho, Colorado,
Wyoming, and Arkansas. Farewell to Manzanar is the story of only one family in
one camp but perhaps serves as an echo of many thousands more. It is also the
story of America during a critical time of war. It was chosen as the 2002
selection for the ReadMOre reading initiative because of its timeliness and the
simple beauty of its style.
During World War II a community called Manzanar was hastily created in the high mountain desert country of California, east of the Sierras. Its purpose was to house thousands of Japanese American internees. One of the first families to arrive was the Wakatsukis, who were ordered to leave their fishing business in Long Beach, California and take with them only the belongings they could carry. For Jeanne Wakatsuki, a seven-year-old child, Manzanar became a way of life in which she struggled and adapted, observed and grew. For her father it was essentially the end of his life.
Thirty years later, Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston wrote a book about those childhood experiences and the community life she remembered in Manzanar. In 1976 her book was adapted into a television movie, and in 2002 both the book and the movie were distributed as part of a teaching kit to 8,500 schools and 1,500 libraries in California. The San Francisco Chronicle named Farewell to Manzanar one of the twentieth century's 100 best nonfiction books from west of the Rockies.
