A Study Guide for Nic Stone's "Dear Martin"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Nic Stone's "Dear Martin", excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: May 17, 2019
• ISBN: 9780028671260

Book preview

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Dear Martin

Nic Stone

2017

Introduction

Nic Stone's young-adult novel Dear Martin (2017) is a look at how profoundly one young African American man's life in Atlanta is affected by police violence, societal racism, and the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Stone broke onto the literary scene with this debut, which has attracted widespread attention for its relevance to some of the most pressing matters in modern American society.

On a regular basis through the 2010s, there have emerged in the national news stories about lethal violence by police officers and others toward African Americans who had not behaved in ways suggesting a lethal threat, if any threat at all. Dear Martin starts with one such scene, as protagonist Justyce, acting out of compassion, is unfairly suspected to be acting as a predator and is treated with unnecessary and excessive force by a police officer. Another scene of violence enacted by a racist white man rocks the novel halfway through. (The N-word is used here and also elsewhere, sometimes intraracially.)

While enduring these episodes, as well as more insidious prejudice from peers at school, Justyce writes letters to Dr. King as a means of helping him figure out his way forward, which grows especially uncertain when he is drawn toward members of a street gang, the Black Jihad. Justyce and his close friend and love interest, Sarah-Jane, are champion debaters, and Dear Martin puts all the arguments on the table.

Author Biography

Andrea Nicole Livingstone—who would adopt the pen name Nic Stone—was born in 1985 with multiethnic heritage and raised in a suburb of Atlanta, Georgia. Her father was a police officer. Stone was an eager reader as a youth, and in the fifth grade she tested into the gifted program in her school, which incidentally disconnected her from nearly all of her African American peers. The program's focus on canonical literature alienated her in a different way, because time-honored stories like Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Of Mice and Men feature black characters primarily as slaves or degraded servants. During high school, Stone was a cheerleader and also acted as the school's mascot, costumed as a big, burly dude-type character, as she told Writer's Digest interviewer J. D. Myall.

After graduating from high school, Stone went on to Georgia Tech, majoring in international affairs, but the experience disagreed with her, and she discontinued her studies. She briefly inclined toward a career in modeling, taking part in a pageant, but she returned to university studies, this time in psychology at Spelman College. After graduating, she spent extensive time mentoring teens and also once worked as the manager of a formal-gown store in West Palm Beach, Florida. Traveling to Israel in the summertime at the age of twenty-three with a goal of spiritual enlightenment, she ended up finding romantic enlightenment, marrying a man she met there. While living in Israel, she worked as an operator and designer of tours of the