Sharon Monteith does a wonderful job with SNCC's Stories, researching and analyzing the narrative culture of the young people who made up the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, adding another dimension to our understanding of their work and thinking. Though initially overlooked by those who approached the movement through the lens of major leaders and events, SNCC's organizers are now well studied. And yet Monteith has unearthed additional sources and offered ways we might use them to extend our understanding of the tough questions that remain. In particular she suggests that by examining SNCC's creative work we might better understand SNCC's interior experience and the emotion of organizing.

Monteith uses chapter 1 to engage with some of the early campus-based writings by young people who were both writing about and creating the movement, including James Forman, who played a crucial role himself in insisting that his SNCC colleagues write constantly – reports, poetry, journalism, and more. Though Forman's first novel went unpublished and abandoned in favor of the movement itself, there is value in Monteith's exploration of Forman's critical thinking about race, religion, and organizing at the moment he headed south.

Michael Thelwell, a Howard University student from Jamaica, was more obviously successful than Forman at publishing short stories, though not nearly as widely known as he should be. In chapter 5, which highlights some of the challenges – as well as the importance to SNCC activists – of centering local people, Monteith argues compellingly that one of Thelwell's short stories offers a more accurate portrayal of the events surrounding a surge of white bombs in McComb, Mississippi, than media coverage at the time. Though the mainstream media failed to convey the extent of white violence while simultaneously accepting the word of local white police who claimed that local African Americans were rioting, Thelwell slipped in a more important truth – that black activists had responded to the bombings by walking armed through the streets. They were not rioting, but they were taking steps to protect themselves. The media missed both stories and it was years before historians corrected the record on the former and added the latter. Thelwell also shows up as one of the two SNCC people, along with playwright and actor John O'Neal, who most consistently gave voice to Junebug Jabbo Jones, a fictional character created collectively by SNCC to represent the wisdom and humor of local people.

While many people will welcome knowing more about SNCC writers like Thelwell, Worth Long, Charles Cobb, Maria Varela, Jane Stembridge, and Gloria House (Aneb Kgositsile), even SNCC insiders are likely to be surprised by how extensively SNCC organizers published, even as they were struggling to overturn white supremacy and survive. For example, while Jean Wheeler was working in Mississippi, she published short stories that made “visible what she was witnessing, realties that informed the feminism evolving through women in SNCC” (167). In Monteith's hands, even writing we know, like Howard Zinn's The New Abolitionists (1964), reveals new insights. She argues, for example, that Zinn's awareness of the “ordinary people” in communities like Albany and Selma “was the catalyst for all his later work” (117), while his approach also inspired Bernice Johnson Reagon, one of the SNCC students he mentored, to defy traditional notions of historical objectivity and write herself into the story (119). Zinn was among a handful of professional writers, also including journalist Pat Watters, psychologist Robert Coles, and attorney Len Holt, whom Monteith includes in this discussion of SNCC's narrative culture. All these authors were compelled by SNCC to push against the boundaries of their professional writing in an effort to capture the emotion and complexity of the organization's story as it unfolded.

These authors found SNCC's story hard to write and, as Monteith's book makes clear, it could be a hard life to live. Charles Sherrod insisted that SNCC staff wrote “out of passion and intensity,” not just “record keeping.” At the same time, one of Thelwell's characters in “The Organizer” illustrated that writing could be constrained, observing, “He had written hundreds of coldly factual reports of burnings, bombings, and murders” (99). Monteith digs deep into a wide range of SNCC creative writing and narrative culture to exhume more of the organization's closely held secrets. Drawing on field reports, poetry, novels, short stories, poems, cartoons, and folk heroes, she helps us understand more about the toughest questions and issues – SNCC's internal debates, the organization's demise, and the “walking wounded.” As Monteith notes, “it was not in the interest of the communities they served for organizers to communicate doubt, despair, or fear, but each is explored in the literature” (220). SNCC “writers share anarchic, community stories and self-consciously extemporize about emotions that were hard to manage. They intervene in debates between professional historians, overtly and presciently, by refusing to separate what happened as history from how it was experienced.” Thanks to SNCC writers and SNCC's Stories we now know more of what SNCC did and learned and how they survived to carry on the struggle.