Economist Glenn C. Loury is one of the most prominent public American intellectuals of our time: he's often radically opposed to the political mainstream and delights in upending what's expected of a Black public figure. But more so than the arguments themselves—on affirmative action, institutional racism, Trumpism—his public life has been characterised by fearlessness and a willingness to recalibrate strongly held and forcefully argued beliefs.

Loury grew up on the south side of Chicago, earned a PhD in MIT’s economics programme and became the first Black tenured professor of economics at Harvard at the age of thirty-three. He has been, at turns, a young father, a drug addict, an adulterer, a psychiatric patient, a born-again Christian, a lapsed born-again Christian, a Black Reaganite who has swung from the right to the left and back again. In Late Admissions, Loury examines what it means to chart a sense of self over the course of a tempestuous but well-considered, life.