Hello and welcome to another episode of Book Lust.
I'm Nancy Pearl.
My guest today is writer David Maraniss.
And we'll be talking about his new book, A Path Lit by Lightning.
David, thank you so much for joining us today.
I'm a sucker for librarians and libraries, so I'm happy to be back.
Well, it's a pleasure to to meet you in person,
because I've just been such a such a fan of your books. And
I you know, I think you just do a great.
You're just you're just great. So.
Your new book, A Path Lit by Lightning,
is a biography of Jim Thorpe.
And many of us,
if we knew who Jim Thorpe was at all,
we were introduced to him
in those childhood biographies
which simplified everything about his life.
What what was the impetus for you?
Why why did you choose him to do your next big biography?
Well, you're so right.
So many people when I told them I was writing this book,
said, oh, I read about him in fourth grade or alternately,
oh, I saw the 1951 movie starring Burt Lancaster.
Those were the ways that people knew the story.
So, you know, I didn't know
much more about him than that either when I started.
But of course, the whole point of being a biographer is to learn about
life and illuminate the history and sociology through someone's life.
You know, I'm not a sportswriter,
but I have written sports biographies in the past.
One on Vince Lombardi, the football coach,
and one on Roberto Clemente, the beautiful ballplayer.
And in those books, as with Thorpe,
I saw the chance to use the drama and action of sports
as a way to illuminate sociology and history.
You know, Jim Thorpe was so much more than an athlete.
It's it gave me the opportunity to write about the Native American experience
through the the stations of the cross of his life.
You know, the idea was first
broached to me a long time ago, more than two decades ago
when I was in Denver on book tour for my book on Vietnam in the sixties,
and a someone who was at the event
who was from the Oneida Nation in Wisconsin and a writer named
Herbert, Norbert Hill, who came up to me afterwards
with his sheaf of papers
and said, David, this is your next book.
Jim Thorpe.
And I politely said, Thank you.
I don't take ideas from other people.
It has to come organically.
I'm writing another book right now.
But he planted the seed and it took a long time to grow.
But I'm glad that it did.
Do you have do you do
you plan your next book well in advance?
I mean, do you know, for example,
what what your next book is is going to be?
That's a great question, Nancy, because this is the first time
in 30 years since my first book, the biography of Bill Clinton,
that I've purposely not planned my next book.
My wife and I, you know, we're 73 years old, but we're going to take a gap year.
Okay.
So, you know, after writing books nonstop for 30 years, I do have some.
Some other books that I will get, too, including a second volume
of my biography of Barack Obama, who I left off at a fairly early age.
But I won't do that until his second memoir
or a book about his presidency comes out
and his library is more complete.
You know, it's really an initial stage of documents there now.
So I can't do only more shot at it.
So I'm not going to do that would probably next.
But I hope I'm around to do it to finish that one.
When you do your research for a book,
I imagine that you have like
piles of three by five note cards.
I mean, how do you I mean, I remember I was I have a master's degree
in history and I remember doing the research.
Of course, that was way before computers, because we're we're almost the same age.
And I remember the fear of losing one of those
one of those important footnotes, the reference to that.
So how do you go about your research?
I'm very old school.
Speaking of index cards, before I
I started my first book, which was the Clinton biography.
I talked to Taylor Branch and Robert
Carow, two great biographers who I deeply admire.
And they shared, you know, I just said, how do you do it?
You know, and Taylor said that he used index cards.
So for my first two or three books, I used index cards
about 5000 or 10,000 of them,
you know, arranged by chronology and theme, you know, in shoeboxes.
And, you know, it worked.
Now, I tend I still don't
use one of those fancy
computer organizational tools, but
but I use three ring binders instead.
So for the Thorpe book, as for my last four or five
or six books, you know, I've had shelves full of three ring binders.
And then I will take, you know, by subject
theme and then before
I write them, start writing the book, I'll take all of that material
and process it one more time into sort of my master notes,
which can be three or 400 single spaced,
single typed pages.
And even then, I work
chapter by chapter, I refine the notes even more and detail to them.
I'm not the sort that writes
out a long outline.
You know, one of my closest writing friends, Rick Atkinson, who writes
about military history, has outlines that are longer than his books.
I don't do that.
You know, I for each chapter, I'll try to figure out
where I want to start, where I'll probably end,
and what the important points are through that chapter.
But then I'll sort of let the magic happen from there.
I don't want everything to be played out ahead of time.
So that's basically my organizational process.
I've always told younger writers, non fiction writers,
that every hour you spend
getting control of your material, will save you hours
and hours of writing time, you know, if you have it ready.
Besides Taylor Branch and Robert Carow,
Are there other biographers that you that you
maybe not have influenced you, but that you read with pleasure?
Oh, yeah. Many.
Stacy Schiff.
That's who I was.
Yeah. I love I loved her book as well.
I apologize.
I don't know how to pronounce her first name
because I had only just read it, but Hermione Lee.
Oh, yeah.
And, you know, I read with,
you know, McCullough and some of the older
standards, you know, I admire all of those.
But I would say Carow is my first role model in terms of
trying to get all of the details in every possible way
and then write it in a storytelling fashion.
But, you know, there are a lot of
I do read a lot of biography and many that I admire.
Do you when you started this book about about Jim Thorpe.
Millard is another one, by the way, who I really. Respect.
I'm sorry. Candace Millard is another one.
Oh, yeah. Oh, Candace, I agree.
Yes. We share we we have those biographers in common.
Absolutely. Candace Millard,
when you started working
on A Path Lit by Lightning or when you imagined it,
did you did you think that it would be
did you plan as detailed as as you go into it?
Or is that the reward of being a good researcher
that you that you found all this information.
I guess the way to answer that is I know it's always out there.
I just have to go find it.
This this biography was different from
my earlier ones for several reasons.
One was that Jim Thorpe,
you know, died in 1953.
He was born in 1887.
So it's really the first biography I've written where there were
no contemporary people to interview.
Even his children were all gone by the time I started researching it.
So that's one significant difference.
So I relied more on archival research and oral histories
and all of that than I would in my other biographies.
The second major difference was COVID.
You know, one of my mottos is go there wherever the story is based.
So, you know, for my Lombardi biography
that's told the story many times that my wife always blanches.
But I turned to her in 1996 and said,
How would you like to move to Green Bay for the winter?
Which she responded brrr but we did.
And I've done that for almost all of my books.
I could not do that this time because of COVID.
You know, I would have spent considerable time in Oklahoma, and I couldn't
it was sort of the epicenter of COVID.
I just couldn't be there.
I didn't get to Stockholm.
Where he won his gold medals for the very same reason.
So in that sense, it was different.
I found ways around that.
But but but the go there, part of it was harder for this book.
I lived for
23 years in Oklahoma, sort of before I moved to Seattle
because my husband was got a job teaching at Oklahoma State University.
So we were there and even there
Jim Thorpe
still I mean, he wasn't somebody.
He wasn't buried there.
First of all.
So there wasn't you didn't learn a lot about Jim Thorpe
being in Oklahoma or even as my children did growing up in Oklahoma
I think.
And I wonder whether if he had not been a Native American
and therefore “the other”
whether we would have learned more.
It would have been he would have been more at the front of
of our experience, especially for people who are interested in sports.
Yeah, I would expect so.
I mean, I think that, you know, in terms of Oklahoma, it's
he's on a level with Will Rogers, who you probably heard more about.
Right.
I mean, I would say those are the two transcendent figures,
not political.
Right.
And, you know,
I did travel through Oklahoma on the book tour, Nancy,
you know, in Tulsa, in Oklahoma City.
And one of the more meaningful aspects of
that was the number of Native Americans who came
and thanked me for writing the book.
So, you know, the experience of white Oklahomans
might have been somewhat different from Native American Oklahomans in terms
of where Thorpe stood in their pantheon of bright figures
or even among white, you know, I mean,
Congressman Cole, who
I might not agree with on any political issues,
is giving the book to all of his people
for Christmas.
You know, so,
in Oklahoma City, I,
I met the mayor who I really like, David Holt,
who's a big book person, spoke at Full Circle Books and and
said, you know, I didn't find
Thorpe be buried there.
He maybe he wasn't.
That could have been.
But I was heartened by the reception.
Mm hmm. So.
So, Jim Thorpe, you talk about
of course you talk about Thorpe's childhood and his experiences.
And one of the formative experiences in his life was that
he was sent to the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania.
And I think for a lot of readers
reading about
about the Carlisle Indian School and the other Indian schools
that were at that time in Canada and the United States
was really a revelation.
What what part do you think
being there played in Thorpe's life?
Well, I think that the Indian boarding school experience
was at the center of anyone's life who went through them.
And I found that to be true with so many people
I talked to while I was doing the book, and then even more so afterwards.
For Thorpe, it's sort of a mixed bag in the sense
that nobody would know of him at all if not for that boarding school where I
that's where he gained fame as a football player
and track star of international fame after the Olympics.
On the other hand,
it was always a,
you know, a
diminishing experience for anybody who went through that.
Carlisle was actually the third boarding school that Jim had been to.
The first one was in Oklahoma, the Sac and Fox boarding school,
where his twin brother died when a disease swept through the school.
And that was a very, very common experience
in all of the Indian boarding schools.
You know, the
the preponderance of deaths of young students at all of those schools,
including Carlisle,
you know, where
the most haunting experience for me when I was there was was going through
the student cemetery, you know, 186 young students who went to Carlisle
and never got back to their homelands because they died there.
And that's just a partial number of them.
Of those who got sick or died.
So, you know, the motto of the Carlisle School
was that, you know, unbelievable, “kill the Indian, save the man”
that was meant to be a progressive idea.
You know that the well-intentioned white
people, rather than literally killing
Native Americans, would try to make them white to save them.
That was the whole process.
It was forced assimilation.
And so, you know, Jim Thorpe went through that process,
like most of the young Native Americans who did
he didn't fully buy into it.
It didn't fully change him, he maintained
his Native American identity, as did so many.
But that was the process that they had to deal with.
And it was something that that sort of reflected
everything that Native Americans dealt with throughout their lives.
One of the one of the themes that runs through
the book is the number of people who really took advantage of,
used Jim Thorpe in many ways.
And one of those was Pop Warner, the great football
well great, the football
the successful
football coach at the Carlisle School.
Could you talk a little bit about that period
and how Pop Warner, who when we think about Pop Warner, I mean, there's
that whole Pop Warner football, you know,
people revere him, you know.
But his relationship with Thorpe was more complicated.
It was as it was with all of these Native American athletes.
He was a it was a innovative and brilliant football coach.
He developed many of the formations that are still in use today.
And he was an early proponent of the forward pass,
which only became legal while he was at Carlisle.
And you know, he had winning teams.
The Carlisle Indian School
defeated all of the great schools in the East Coast, which that period,
unbelievably, were Ivy League schools, you know,
Yale and Penn and Harvard and Princeton plus West Point
and Syracuse and a few others.
And his his team was incredibly popular
wherever they played
there would be sellout crowds.
But the irony there, Nancy, is that people came to see them play
because they were good, but also because they were exotic.
They were Indians. Right.
But they were playing for a school
that was trying to drum that part of them out, make them white, you know.
So but anyway, Pop Warner,
brilliant coach, not a brilliant human being.
By the end of his tenure at Carlisle,
his players had turned against him, said he was physically and mentally abusive.
And at the crisis point of
Jim Thorpe's life, when his medals were rescinded,
taken away from him after the Olympics because he played minor league baseball,
Pop Warner lied about it to save his own reputation.
Yeah. Another person who doesn't come off very well and in the biography
is Avery Brundage, the head of the IOC, the International Olympic Committee.
Well, Brundage doesn't come across well in any of my books.
He's in another one too, a book I wrote about the 1960 Rome Olympics.
And even in a book that my son Andrew wrote about the 1936 Olympics.
He was a miserable human being
and, you know,
the interesting thing about his relationship with Thorpe
was that he, too, was a decathlete at those 1912 Stockholm games.
He was not very good. He was mediocre.
Thorpe crushed him in the competitions,
and Brundage actually dropped out before the final of the ten events
because he was being beaten so badly, which sort of goes against his
whole notion of it's not what nationality you represent or how you perform,
but just the beauty of amateurism, which was a sham from the beginning.
But in any case, after that period,
he rose to become, as you say, the head of the International Olympic Committee.
And for decades, he refused to give Jim Thorpe his do.
It wasn't until after Brundage was dead and gone
that Thorpe finally got his medals restored in records.
And another theme that runs
through the book is the way Jim Thorpe
was exoticized, but was kind of romanticized
and dehumanized at the same time.
And and you talk about the phrase “lo, the poor Indian.”
Could could you expand on that?
Well, I think that one of the central
threads of the book is that that
way of dealing with Native Americans
romanticizing and diminishing them at the same time.
It’s common with all of them, not just Jim Thorpe. And that’s
white society dealt with Indians.
You know, there are you know people would say that
we would probably say that they had some Cherokee blood in them, you know, white people.
They would never say that about having African American blood.
It there's a different sensibility based on, you know, the history of the two.
You know, even though,
you know,
African Americans were enslaved and Native Americans were killed,
the white society dealt with them differently.
So, “lo, the poor Indian” is a phrase that
for reasons that I can't tell you, Nancy, became
popularized by sportswriters in the early parts of the 20th century.
Whenever they're writing about Indians that use that phrase, it became so popular
that they could just write “lo poor” or “lo,”
and the readers would know what they were talking about.
And it could be used for better or worse.
You know, if a Native American was suffering in some sense “lo, the poor Indian.”
If they were defeating the white, the white team of football.
“Lo, the poor Indian.”
Nonetheless, for Jim Thorpe, it was very commonly applied to him
after he lost his gold medals and so many of the events that he suffered
throughout in his life.
You mentioned at the
beginning of of when we started talking about the the biographical film
that was made of him starring Burt Lancaster.
That's that's ironic in and of itself.
Did...
And there's a scene in the book where Jim,
one of Jim Thorpe's daughters, is waiting for a bus and the film
is playing at the movie theater across the street, I believe it was.
Did he see the film?
He saw it.
And his wife, his third wife, Patsy, saw it.
He was given
a modest, modest salary for being a consultant on the film.
But but the people who produced it didn't really consult him much at all.
And he had very mixed feelings about the movie.
First, I mean, you know, Burt Lancaster is a movie star,
he’s actually a very good athlete as well.
So in that sense, you know, it was could have been worse.
Thorpe always wanted a Native American to play him.
And a matter of fact, you know, for much of that latter
period of his life, he lived in Southern California
and worked on the fringes of the studio industry.
It appears in more than 70 films, you know, as an extra
or a very minor character.
But during that period, he was constantly campaigning
for the studios to hire
real Indians, to play Indians, real Native
Americans, to play Native Americans, which they often did not do.
So it's classic that in this case it would not be a Native American playing
Jim Thorpe, the director of that movie, Michael Curtiz,
was an excellent director who directed Casablanca.
So, you know, it had it had a pretty high powered people behind it.
And, you know, in essence, it's
a sympathetic movie, but it's wrong.
And it's, the most
wrong thing about it is something we talked about.
Pop Warner, who is the narrator of the movie.
And the implication is that if only Thorpe had listened to Pop
and more successfully assimilated into white society, he wouldn't suffer,
wouldn't have suffered the way he did, which is, you know, it's just wrong.
So that that's the way I view the movie.
And there's a chapter in the book sort of deconstructing all of that.
Right.
Was what was the thing that most
I guess this is got to be our last question but, sadly.
But what is the what was the thing that surprised you the most in doing the book?
Because when I was reading it, the thing that surprised me the most was
that was it Marianne Moore, the poet who taught at the Carlisle Indian School?
I thought, that is wow.
Who would have thought?
Oh, I agree completely.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, it's not a huge thing,
but who would have thought this great American poet?
You know, she was 23, just out of Bryn Mawr,
and her family lived in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and she taught there.
And I went up to the Rosenbach Library in Philadelphia
and found a sort of a partial or a memoir that she wrote where she talks
about all of that and some other materials up there
that allowed me to introduce her into the book.
And yeah, I just...
you know, she's probably the jewel of the so so many,
many famous people who somehow intersected with Jim Thorpe throughout his life,
you know, from the generals, Dwight Eisenhower, who played football
against him, and George Patton, who was on the Olympic team with him
all the way through.
You find all of these characters that Marianne Moore was the most
surprising and delightful.
So, I guess we could say that
Jim Thorpe was the Kevin Bacon of his day.
Yeah, that's right.
He was.
One of the things that I just
so admire about your books is the way you take a subject.
And you alluded to this at the beginning, how you take a subject
and give us give us the readers,
the whole picture of the society, because it would be so easy.
I mean, it's never
easy, but but without all of that context, there's no way of understanding
who Jim Thorpe was or any of the people whose biographies, you know.
Yeah, I'm glad you say that.
I mean, that's that's my philosophy of what I do.
You know, there are always going to be a few reviewers who say, you know,
there's too much of that.
But I don't care if they say that because that's what I do.
I mean, that's the way I want to do it.
And so, I mean, because I believe deeply that to understand
someone in their fullness, you have to see the forces that shaped them.
So that includes, you know, geography
and family and the context of their time.
Right. Right.
David Maraniss, thank you so much for being on Book Lust today.
And I'm so glad I finally got to meet you in person, more or less.
I hope I get out to Seattle someday and we can meet.
What did they say in IRL.
Yes. Right, right, IRL.
Okay. I will look forward to that.
Thank you so much. Okay.
Bye bye. Bye.