Burning Down My Masters' House is the highly-anticipated memoir that captures the pain, anger and fierce determination of Jayson Blair. A young black journalist who descended from slaves, he rose to become a national correspondent at the New York Times before igniting the largest journalism scandal in decades. Blair accepts all the words that have been used to describe him: liar, thief, fabricator and plagiarist. He does not push responsibility for his actions onto anyone else, but seeks to explain how someone with talent and opportunity could fall from such great heights, primarily by his own hand. For the first time, in his own words, Blair seeks to answer the question that consumed media watchers, writers and readers everywhere: How could such a thing have happened at the New York Times?