This week, author David Maraniss discusses his new book Path Lit By Lightning: The Life of Jim Thorpe, the definitive biography of a great American athlete who struggled most of his life to overcome racist stereotypes.
Maraniss is an associate editor at The Washington Post and a distinguished visiting professor at Vanderbilt University. He has won two Pulitzer Prizes for journalism and was a finalist three other times. Among his bestselling books are biographies of Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Roberto Clemente, and Vince Lombardi, and a trilogy about the 1960s—Rome 1960; Once in a Great City (winner of the RFK Book Prize); and They Marched into Sunlight (winner of the J. Anthony Lucas Prize and Pulitzer Finalist in History).
Maraniss is interviewed by Kelly Wisecup, professor of English and director of the Kaplan Institute for the Humanities at Northwestern University, where she is also an affiliate of the Center for Native American and Indigenous Research.