Folks

Novelist Jonathan Lethem was born in New York City (1964). His parents were bohemian idealists who stayed in their Brooklyn neighborhood even as most white families moved away, and there were only a handful of other white kids in Jonathan's school. He grew up, dropped out of college, worked in bookstores, and became a novelist. He decided to write a novel based on his own childhood, a story about a white kid named Dylan and a black kid named Mingus growing up together in Brooklyn in the 1970s. The two friends find a magic ring that gives them superhero powers. That novel was The Fortress of Solitude (2003).