Late Admissions

A shockingly frank memoir from a prize-winning economist, reflecting on his remarkable personal odyssey and his changing positions on identity, race and belief



Glenn C. Loury is often radically opposed to the political mainstream and delights in upending what’s expected of a Black public figure. But more than the arguments themselves, his public life has been characterised by fearlessness and a willingness to recalibrate strongly held and forcefully argued beliefs. Loury grew up on the south side of Chicago, earned a PhD in MIT’s economics programme 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 and a Black Reaganite. In Late Admissions, Loury examines what it means to chart a sense of self over the course of a tempestuous but well-considered life.