Really ‘Remarkable’: New biography of Reed Peggram is an account of defiant love

With many titles, a descriptive superlative is but a hopeful publisher’s disappointing exaggeration.

- MICHAEL HENRY ADAMS

With many titles, a descriptive superlative is but a hopeful publisher’s disappointing exaggeration. This is not so with Dr. Ethelene Whitmire, a University of Wisconsin School of Library and Information Studies professor, and her new biography. From start to finish, “The Remarkable Life Of Reed Peggram: The Man Who Stared Down World War II in the Name of Love,” is nothing but remarkable, in every sense.

Appearing earlier this year, from Viking, it’s already commanded considerable notice. Covered on NPR and in People, praised by Publishers Weekly and in Essence Magazine, it has even given rise to a docudrama, “The Final Letter,” premiering Saturday, June 20, 2026 at the Roxbury (Boston) International Film Festival. A TV series, or Hollywood film, are surely soon to come?

Dr. Whitmire skillfully presents yet another fact-filled, but stranger-than-fiction life of astounding achievement and heroic perseverance. Peggram’s journey puts the lie to the stereotype of the unqualified DEI candidate. In her compelling book, a young gifted Black and queer boy born in 1914 in Dorchester, Massachusetts progresses undaunted by obstacles. Once his father is institutionalized after suffering mental collapse during World War I, his parents divorce and his mother remarries. Poorly educated and disabled, Peggram’s stepfather was sufficiently antagonized by Peggram’s “effeminate intellectualism,” and so he went to live with his devoted grandmother. It is this steadfast woman with just a third-grade education to whom Dr. Whitmire dedicates her book.