During the civil rights campaigns of 1964 and 1965, Jonathan Kozol moved from Harvard  Square into a poor African-American neighborhood of Boston and became a fourth grade teacher in the Boston public schools. Since then, Kozol has devoted his life to education and social justice in America.

Death at an Early Age, a description of Jonathan Kozol's first year as a teacher, was published in 1967 and received the 1968 National Book Award in Science, Philosophy, and Religion. Now regarded as a classic by educators, it has sold more than two million copies in the United States and Europe.

Among the other highly honored books that Jonathan Kozol has written since are Rachel and Her Children, a study of homeless mothers and their children, which received the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award for 1989 and the Conscience in Media Award of the American Society of Journalists and Authors. Savage Inequalities, which won the New England Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1992.

Jonathan's 1995 best-seller, Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation, was praised by scholars such as Robert Coles and Henry Louis Gates, and children’s advocates all over the nation, Amazing Grace received the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in 1996, an honor previously granted to the works of Langston Hughes and Dr. Martin Luther King.

Now, in Jonathan Kozol's most recent work, Letters to a Young Teacher, Kozol uses his knowledge and experience to guide the newest generation of America's teachers into the ethically complicated challenges of what he calls a beautiful profession.

Letters to a Young Teacher reignites a number of the controversial issues Jonathan Kozol has powerfully addressed in recent years: high-stakes testing that turns many classrooms into test-prep factories, the invasion of public schools by private corporations and the persistent inequalities of urban education.