Phyllis Vine

Phyllis Vine (2018) is an American historian who has taught at Sarah Lawrence College, the University of Michigan, Union College, and Barnard College. A graduate of the Columbia School of Journalism, she has written for The Nation, The Progressive, and Parents magazine. Her first book, “Families in Pain,” was a groundbreaking analysis of the problems facing families with a mentally ill relative.

Phyllis’s most recent book, “One Man’s Castle: Clarence Darrow in Defense of the American Dream,” tells the dramatic story of Dr. Ossian Sweet, a model citizen who moved into a house the Ku Klux Klan thought should be off-limits to an accomplished member of the Black Bourgeoisie. Historian David Levering Lewis has called this tragic tale “one of the most significant of all horror stories of Jim Crow gone North.”

As a Logan Nonfiction fellow, Phyllis will write “Finishing the Revolution: The People and Politics of Mental Health Reform.” The book profiles scientists, politicians, pioneering clinicians, civil servants, and tenacious mental health care activists-including networks of angry parents and members of a patient liberation movement who lobby to reform mental health care.