Non-Fiction
| Title | Published | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|
| Two on the River | 1988 | Buy |
| King of the Cats | 1993 | Buy |
| The Haygoods of Columbus | 1997 | Buy |
| In Black and White | 2003 | Buy |
| Sweet Thunder | 2009 | Buy |
| The Butler | 2013 | Buy |
| Showdown | 2015 | Buy |
| Tigerland: 1968-1969 | 2018 | Buy |
| I Too Sing America | 2018 | Buy |
| Colorization | 2021 | Buy |
Wil Haygood has spent his career as a journalist and author telling stories about African American life, culture, and history. A longtime writer for the Washington Post, he published his first book, Two on the River, in 1988. Over the following decades, he produced a string of biographies and historical works, including King of the Cats (1993), a biography of Adam Clayton Powell Jr., and The Haygoods of Columbus (1997), a memoir about his own family. In Black and White (2003) is his biography of Sammy Davis Jr., and Sweet Thunder (2009) chronicles the life of Thurgood Marshall.
His most widely known work is The Butler (2013), the true story of Eugene Allen, a White House butler whose career spanned eight presidential administrations. The book became the basis for Lee Daniels’s film starring Forest Whitaker. Wil Haygood continued with Showdown (2015), about Thurgood Marshall’s Supreme Court confirmation, and later published Tigerland: 1968-1969 (2018), about two championship sports teams from a segregated high school in Columbus, Ohio. Colorization (2021), his most recent book, examines how race has been portrayed in American cinema from the silent film era to the present. Across ten books published between 1988 and 2021, Haygood has built one of the most significant bodies of work in contemporary American nonfiction.