David Maraniss

Pulitzer Prize winner and part-time Madison resident David Maraniss sure knows how to pick subjects for his engrossing sports biographies: Vince Lombardi (When Pride Still Mattered), Roberto Clemente (Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball’s Last Hero), and now Jim Thorpe. In Path Lit By Lightning, Maraniss’s massive new book, he deconstructs the myth surrounding arguably America’s greatest all-around athlete — a Native American whose misunderstood life was an endless struggle against the odds. Publishers Weekly hails the book as an “essential work [that] restores a legendary figure to his rightful place in history.” If you can’t make it to this Wisconsin Book Festival event, Maraniss also will be at First Unitarian Society for a talk hosted by Mystery to Me and IdeaFest on Sept. 20.

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media release: In PATH LIT BY LIGHTNING: The Life of Jim Thorpe (Simon & Schuster; on sale: August 9, 2022), Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and bestselling author David Maraniss returns to what he does best: the great American biography.

Maraniss has written about the life of iconic sports figures in When Pride Still Mattered and Clem

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Linda Maraniss

David Maraniss

ente, and Jim Thorpe was arguably America’s greatest all-around athlete: a gold medalist at the 1912 Olympics in the decathlon and pentathlon; a star on the Carlisle Indian School’s football team and the first class of the Pro Football Hall of Fame; and a major league baseball player for John McGraw’s New York Giants. But despite his vast skills, he struggled his entire lifetime against racism, he was unfairly stripped of his Olympic gold medals, and his later years were troubled by alcohol, broken marriages, and financial distress.

Thanks to his Olympic and football career, Jim Thorpe became world famous, although his identity and culture were frequently diminished. And unfortunately, he never achieved financial success commensurate with his fame. Professional sports during that era didn’t pay nearly as well as they do today, and most of his life he did odd jobs roaming from state to state. In 1953, Thorpe died of a heart attack in a trailer home. Rather than have him buried per his will in his home state of Oklahoma, his third wife essentially auctioned off his body to a town in northeastern Pennsylvania that was willing to change its name to Jim Thorpe. He was laid to rest in a place he had never even seen. He remains there to this day, in a grave in Jim Thorpe, PA.

Today Thorpe is more myth than man, a brief lesson in 4^th grade history class about the Native American man who claimed gold at the Olympics. Maraniss was encouraged by Indigenous academics and activists to take a deeper look at the Jim Thorpe story. This biography aims not only to recapture the drama and pathos of the athlete’s career but also to consider it in the context of the mistreatment and manipulation of American Indians during Thorpe’s lifetime. Known for his meticulous research, Maraniss paints an unforgettable portrait of Thorpe by drawing on letters, diaries, oral histories, contemporaneous newspaper accounts, and primary documents from 22 archives.

PATH LIT BY LIGHTNING will be the definitive biography of a legendary man. Jim Thorpe’s story was as American as could be: a great athlete and a celebrity, but at the same time a man who struggled most of his adult life to overcome stereotypes and feed his family. Despite it all, he remained resilient and determined, always finding a way to survive. Releasing in August, Thorpe’s biography will be released the same week as the new class of inductees are honored at the Pro Football Hall of Fame and shortly after the 110^th anniversary of the famed 1912 Olympics.