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Sloan, Bill. I Watched a Wild Hog Eat My Baby. Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 2001.

Smith-Shomade, Beretta E. Shaded Lives: African-American Women and Television. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2002.

Staten, Vince. Do Bald Men Get Half-Price Haircuts? New York: Touchstone, 2001.

Steele, Carrington. Don’t Drink the Kool-Aid. Self-published, 2008.

Steinberg, Neil. The Alphabet of Modern Annoyances. New York: Doubleday, 1996.

Tillis, James “Quick,” as told to J. Engleman Price. Thinking Big. Chicago: The LPG Group, 2000.

Tolle, Eckhart. A New Earth. New York: Plume, 2005.

Waldron, Robert. Oprah! New York: St. Martin’s, 1987.

Walker, Alice. The Same River Twice. New York: Scribner, 1996.

Walker, Andre. (Foreword by Oprah Winfrey.) Andre Talks Hair! New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997.

Walker, Margaret. Jubilee. New York: Mariner Books, 1999 (originally published 1966).

White, Evelyn C. Alice Walker. New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 2004.

White, Wendel A. Small Towns, Black Lives. Oceanville, N.J.: The Noyes Museum of Art, 2003.

Wilson, Melba. Crossing the Boundary: Black Women Survive Incest. Seattle: Seal Press, 1994.

Winfrey, Oprah. The Best of Oprah’s What I Know for Sure. Supplement to O, the Oprah Magazine, undated.

_____. Journey to Beloved. New York: Hyperion, 1998.

Winfrey, Shakeeta. The Other Winfrey: Life in the Shadow of O. Decatur, Ga.: Marketing Communications Group, 2007.

Wolffe, Richard. Renegade: The Making of a President. New York: Crown, 2009.

Acknowledgments

A BOOK ABOUT someone as complex and fascinating as Oprah Winfrey could not have a better home than Random House, Inc., and the Crown Publishing Group. The support of Peter Olson, former CEO, and Jenny Frost, former president of Crown, to present a full, comprehensive biography of one of the most powerful public figures of our time gave me the opportunity to write about the American dream with all its rags and riches, ravages and rewards.

Throughout four years of research and reporting I was guided—superbly—by the exacting voice of my editor Peter Gethers and assisted at every turn by his extraordinary assistant Christina Malach and the supremely talented editor Claudia Herr. Under the leadership of Markus Dohle, CEO of Random House, Crown’s president Maya Mavjee, publisher Tina Constable, and marketing director Philip Patrick, I began to live the dream of all authors: a fabulous publishing experience, which included the wonderful organizational skills of Amy Boorstein, the artistic eye of Mary Choteborsky, the copyediting genius of Jenna Dolan, David Tran’s sophisticated cover design, and the silken talents of David Drake, head of publicity, in conjunction with Marina Ein, Jeff Ingram, and Rebecca Kelley of Ein Communications. In addition, I was blessed during the lawyering process with outstanding counsel from Kathy Trager and Matthew Martin.

I’m grateful to all of the Crown Publishing Group, most particularly Robert Siek, production editorial; Linnea Knollmueller, production; Barbara Sturman, design; Amanda D’Acierno, publisher of audio; Jill Flaxman, sales marketing; Linda Kaplan, subrights; and Jacob Bronstein, who introduced me to the twenty-first-century wonders of Twitter and Facebook.

I owe immense thanks to my longtime agent, Wayne S. Kabak, who has held my hand through many books, and to Larry Kirshbaum, who joined us in this publishing venture.

The research for this book began with my assistant Stephanie K. Eller, who organized 2,732 files on the life of Oprah Winfrey, divided into names, dates, and subjects. In addition, Stephanie pored over the 990 tax returns of Oprah’s various foundations to design the financial graphs in Chapter 18. She spent days fact-checking every chapter and compiling the documentation for the end notes. Along the way we were assisted by excellent research and reporting from Liz Rich, Leon Wagener, Carolyn Hardnett Robinson, Monika Blackwell, Alexander Hilhorst, Shilpa Nadhan, Wendy Lyons Sunshine, and Patti