The first book is tentatively scheduled to appear in the autumn of 2011, Crown said in a statement on Sunday.

It would be followed a year later by a second book about her upbringing in Birmingham, Alabama, where she was born in 1954. Dr Rice grew up amid segregation and during the civil rights movement in the United States.

Random House Children's Books will also publish a young-adult edition of the family memoir at the same time.

Crown is a division of Random House, itself part of the German media giant Bertelsmann AG. -- REUTERS