About the Author

Gene Dattel grew up in the majority-black cotton country of the Mississippi Delta. He was educated at Yale University and Vanderbilt University Law School. He then embarked on a twenty-year career in finance as a managing director of Salomon Brothers and Morgan Stanley. He lived overseas for fifteen years—London, Hong Kong, and Tokyo during his financial profession. His first book The Sun that Never Rose presciently outlined Japan's long term structural economic problems when conventional wisdom predicted an unassailable economic juggernaut. His most recent book, Cotton and Race in the Making of America (2009) describes the fateful intersection of the power of cotton to the African American experience. He is now a financial and cultural historian who lectures widely.