LATE ADMISSIONS: CONFESSIONS OF A BLACK CONSERVATIVE

NEW YORK, NY – Economist Glenn C. Loury is one of the most prominent public intellectuals of our time: he’s often radically opposed to the political mainstream, and delights in upending what’s expected of a black public figure. But more so than the arguments themselves, his public life has been characterized by fearlessness and a willingness to recalibrate strongly held and forcefully argued beliefs.

LATE ADMISSIONS: Confessions of a Black Conservative (W. W. Norton & Company; May 14, 2024; $32.50 hardcover) is Loury’s shockingly frank memoir, reflecting on his remarkable personal odyssey—including drug addiction, hospitalizations, and infidelity—along with his changing positions on identity, race, and belief. 

“I am going to tell you things about myself that no one would want anybody to think was true of them,” Loury writes. “And yet, they are true. I am going to tell you that I have lied, because I need you to believe me. I am going to tell you that I have deceived those closest to me, because I need you to trust me. I am going to tell you that I have abandoned people who needed me, because I need you to stick with me. I must tell it all in this memoir, because if I don’t tell it all, nothing I say will be heard.” 

Loury’s work focuses on affirmative action, the black family, and black patriotism. As an economic theorist, Loury has published widely and lectured throughout the world on his research. He is also among America’s leading critics writing on racial inequality.   

Loury grew up on the south side of Chicago, earned a PhD in MIT’s economics program, and became the first black tenured professor of economics at Harvard at the age of thirty-three. He has been, at turns, a young father, a drug addict, an adulterer, a psychiatric patient, a born-again Christian, a lapsed born-again Christian, a black Reaganite who has swung from the right to the left and back again. In LATE ADMISSIONS, Loury examines what it means to chart a sense of self over the course of a tempestuous, but well-considered, life. 

“Why write a memoir? I’ve lived a unique life—singular, in ways both good and bad,” Loury writes. “There are a lot of things I went through and that I put myself through that I needed to think about. In some sense, I needed to explain everything not only to readers who I felt would be interested, but also to myself.” 

About the Author 

Glenn C. Loury, a prominent social critic, is the Merton P. Stoltz Professor of the Social Sciences and professor of economics at Brown University and John Paulson Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute. He has been elected as a distinguished fellow of the American Economics Association, a member of the American Philosophical Society and of the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations, and a fellow of the Econometric Society and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Loury holds a B.A. in Mathematics from Northwestern and a Ph.D. in Economics from M.I.T. He lives in Providence, Rhode Island.