BRATTLEBORO — On Friday, April 14, at 5 p.m., the Brattleboro Literary Festival's Literary Cocktail Hour will present Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Maraniss, author of Path Lit By Lightning: The Life of Jim Thorpe. Maraniss will be in conversation with Bob Parks, president of the board of the Brattleboro Literary Festival.
Jim Thorpe rose to world fame as a mythic talent who excelled at every sport. He won gold medals in the decathlon and pentathlon at the 1912 Stockholm Olympics, was an All-American football player at the Carlisle Indian School, was the star of the first class of the Pro Football Hall of Fame, and played major league baseball for John McGraw's New York Giants. Even in a golden age of sports celebrities, Thorpe was one of a kind. But despite his colossal skills, Thorpe's life was a struggle against the odds.
As a member of the Sac and Fox Nation, he encountered duplicitous authorities who turned away from him when their reputations were at risk.
At Carlisle, he dealt with the racist assimilationist philosophy “Kill the Indian, Save the Man.” His gold medals were unfairly rescinded because he had played minor league baseball. His later life was troubled by alcohol, broken marriages, and financial distress.
Thorpe roamed from state to state and took bit parts in Hollywood films, but even the film of his own life failed to improve his fortunes. For all his travails, Thorpe did not succumb. The man survived, complications and all, and so did the myth.
David Maraniss is a New York Times best-selling author, fellow of the Society of American Historians, and visiting distinguished professor at Vanderbilt University. He has been affiliated with The Washington Post for more than 40 years as an editor and writer, and twice won Pulitzer Prizes at the newspaper.
In 1993, he received the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for his coverage of Bill Clinton, and in 2007 he was part of a team that won a Pulitzer for coverage of the Virginia Tech shooting. He was also a Pulitzer finalist three other times, including for one of his books, They Marched Into Sunlight.
He has won many other major writing awards, including the George Polk Award, the Robert F. Kennedy Book Prize, the Anthony Lukas Book Prize, and the Frankfurt eBook Award. A Path Lit By Lightning is his 13th book. He and his wife Linda, a retired environmentalist, live in Washington, D.C., and Madison, Wisconsin, their home town.
Bob Parks is a Curriculum Developer at MIT in Boston and a freelance writer of long-form stories on inventors, design, and energy innovations for Bloomberg Businessweek, Wired, and Make. He loves to run and finished the Boston Marathon in 2014 in 2 hours, 54 minutes. Bob lives in Brattleboro with his wife and their son and daughter.
Register for this free online event at bit.ly/LitCocktail29.