Isabel Wilkerson is an american writer who was born in 1961 and who won a Pulitzer Price,a journalism’s price. She is famous thanks to his books,in particular thanks to “The Warmth of the other suns:The epic story of America’s Great Migration”. She spent 15 years to reporting and writing this book. The book’s purpose is to tell to readers the chronicles of the migration of 6 million black Americans out of the South and into the North and the West from 1915 to the 1970s. The book intertwines a general history and statistical analysis of the entire period, and the biographies of three persons: a sharecropper’s wife who left Mississippi in the 1930s for Chicago, named Ida Mae Brandon Gladney; an agricultural worker, George Swanson Starling, who left Florida for New York City in the 1940s; and Robert Joseph Pershing Foster, a doctor who left Louisiana in the early 1950s, for Los Angeles.
During a conference to present the book,she said that the the hardest thing to do for her was choose the characters. As far as the characters’emotions she said: ” These people wanted their stories told. They were the ones who spurred me on in the end. They wanted people to know what they had endured. They had lived with this for so long, that they were in some ways unburdening themselves”. About their characters,she said: “I wanted people who were beautifully imperfect. Perfection is not real, and readers cannot identify with people presented as perfect. I wanted to find people who were at peace with their mistakes and with the things they had done not particularly well. I wanted people who were willing to be who they really, truly were.”

Source:http://www.niemanstoryboard.org/2012/08/03/i-wanted-people-who-were-beautifully-imperfect-isabel-wilkerson-on-finding-characters-mayborn-2012-vol-3/