There's Always This Year
The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry

Kent State: Four Dead in Ohio

From Derf Backderf, the bestselling author of My Friend Dahmer, comes the Eisner and ALA/YALSA Alex Award-winning tragic and unforgettable story of the Kent State shootings, told in graphic novel form.

Named a Best Book of the Year by New York Times, Forbes, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, and NPR, Kent State: Four Dead in Ohio is a moving and troubling story about the bitter price of dissent–as relevant today as it was in 1970.

On May 4, 1970, the Ohio National Guard gunned down unarmed college students protesting the Vietnam War at Kent State University. In a deadly barrage of 67 shots, four students were killed and nine shot and wounded. It was the day America turned guns on its own children–a shocking event burned into our national memory.

The fatal shootings triggered immediate and massive outrage on campuses around the country. More than four million students participated in organized walkouts at hundreds of universities, colleges, and high schools, the largest student strike in the history of the United States at that time. It was a day that shocked the nation and helped turn the tide of public opinion against America’s war in Vietnam.

A few days prior, 10-year-old Derf Backderf saw those same guardsmen patrolling his nearby hometown, sent in by the governor to crush a trucker strike.

Using the journalism skills he employed on My Friend Dahmer and Trashed, Backderf has conducted extensive interviews and research to explore the lives of these four young people and the events of those four days in May, when the country seemed on the brink of tearing apart.

In this award-winning and powerful graphic novel, Derf Backderf takes us back to the age of the Vietnam War, Richard Nixon, Woodstock, and the Cold War and explores, in words and images, a scene of tragedy: the campus of Kent State University, where National Guard Troops attacked unarmed protestors and killed four students (Allison Beth Krause, age 19, Jeffrey Glenn Miller, age 20, Sandra Lee Scheuer, age 20, and William Knox Schroeder, age 19).

More Adult, Non-Juvenile Books

  • Based upon painstaking research, We Hereby Refuse presents an original vision of America's past with disturbing links to the American present.

  • Punctuated by historical images and told through multiple voices, languages, literary forms and documents, West: A Translation explores what unites and divides America, drawing a powerful, necessary connection between the completion of the transcontinental railroad and the Chinese Exclusion Act.

  • One of the most distinctive and prolific writers of the Harlem Renaissance, Anita Scott Coleman (1890-1960) found popular and critical success in the flourishing African American press of the early twentieth century. Yet unlike many of her New York-based contemporaries, Coleman lived her life in the American West, first in New Mexico and later in California. Her work thus offers a rare view of African American life in that region. Broader in scope than any previous anthology of Coleman’s writings, this volume collects the author’s finest stories, essays, and poems, including many not published since they first appeared in African American [...]

  • In Whalesong: The True Story of the Musician Who Talked to Orcas, readers will be enchanted by the tale of Paul Horn, a professional musician who, alongside scientist Dr. Paul Spong, discovers the ability to communicate with captive orcas through music. This captivating story not only highlights the bond between humans and these majestic creatures but also ignites an entire anti-captivity movement dedicated to their protection.

    Read More about "Whalesong: The True Story of the Musician Who Talked to Orcas"...