Isabel Wilkerson was born in Washington DC in 1961. She studied journalism at Howard University. She went on to become Chicago bureau chief of the New York Times, winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1994 and Journalist of the Year from the National Association of Black Journalists the same year. She was the first African American woman to win a Pulitzer. She has also taught journalism at many major universities, including Emory, Princeton, and Northwestern.

Caste is not her first work about inequality in the United States. She achieved wide recognition for her 2010 work, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration, in which she traces the common geographic routes individuals took out of the South through the lives of individuals. The book is based on extensive interviews and research and became a bestseller. It also received the National Book Critics Circle Award.

In Caste, Wilkerson likens herself to a “housing inspector” as she examines the foundations of America’s caste system, and she draws on both her extensive research and her personal experience as an African American woman to reveal how caste systems shape the lives of those within them.