Popular Press
Toshio Mori Endured Internment Camps and Overcame Discrimination to Become the First Japanese American to Publish a Book of Fiction
The Conversation
(2022)
Abstract
Eighty years ago, on Feb. 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, which led to more than 100,000 people of Japanese ancestry living in the western United States being moved into internment camps.
At the time, Toshio Mori, a U.S. citizen with Japanese parents, was an aspiring writer who had a contract to publish a collection of his short stories in 1942. As a result of the executive order, however, he was sent to one of the camps, and the publisher delayed the book’s release.
As an archivist and scholar studying publishing in the western United States, I’ve found unpublished and unreported archives that tell the story of Mori’s difficulty getting his book, “Yokohama, California,” published in a country roiled by prejudice against Asian Americans.
Keywords
- literature,
- Japan,
- World War II,
- fiction,
- publishing,
- archives,
- Franklin Delano Roosevelt,
- Japanese Americans,
- US literature,
- Japanese internment camps,
- writers
Disciplines
Publication Date
February 15, 2022
Citation Information
Alessandro Meregaglia. "Toshio Mori Endured Internment Camps and Overcame Discrimination to Become the First Japanese American to Publish a Book of Fiction" The Conversation (2022) Available at: http://works.bepress.com/alessandro-meregaglia/15/
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