Ta-Nehisi Coates is best known for his writing in The Atlantic and the letter to his son that became the book Between the World and Me (2015).
Coates was born in Baltimore in 1975; he has said his name is Egyptian and loosely refers to Nubia. His father Paul was a Vietnam veteran and a member of the Black Panther Part; he was a self-taught historian and voracious reader, two qualities he passed on to his son. Coates’s mother Cheryl was a schoolteacher. Ta-Nehisi Coates attended high school in Baltimore and then matriculated at Howard University in 1993, which he left after five years without receiving a degree.
While Coates says he first thought that hip-hop would be his way out of...
