Path Lit by Lightning: The Life of Jim Thorpe

by David Maraniss

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

One of the greatest athletes of our time, Jim Thorpe excelled in any sport he played. However, Thorpe did not live an easy life. Thorpe struggled against racism, alcoholism, and financial problems. His gold medals were stripped from him because he was Native American. Despite all these hardships, Thorpe persisted. David Maraniss does a wonderful job capturing Jim Thorpe as a man, rather than Jim Thorpe as an athlete.

A biography of America’s greatest all-around athlete that “goes beyond the myth and into the guts of Thorpe’s life, using extensive research, historical nuance, and bittersweet honesty” (Los Angeles Times), by the bestselling author of the classic biography When Pride Still Mattered.

Jim Thorpe rose to world fame as a mythic talent who excelled at every sport. Most famously, he won gold medals in the decathlon and pentathlon at the 1912 Stockholm Olympics. A member of the Sac and Fox Nation, he was an All-American football player at the Carlisle Indian School, 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, he was one of a kind.

But despite his awesome talent, Thorpe’s life was a struggle against the odds. At Carlisle, he faced the racist assimilationist philosophy “Kill the Indian, Save the Man.” His gold medals were unfairly rescinded because he had played minor league baseball, and his supposed allies turned away from him when their own reputations were at risk. His later life was troubled by alcohol, broken marriages, and financial distress. He roamed from state to state and took bit parts in Hollywood, but even the film of his own life failed to improve his fortunes. But for all his travails, Thorpe survived, determined to shape his own destiny, his perseverance becoming another mark of his mythic stature.

Path Lit by Lightning “[reveals] Thorpe as a man in full, whose life was characterized by both soaring triumph and grievous loss” (The Wall Street Journal).

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781476748436
Publisher:	Simon & Schuster
Publication date:	08/09/2022
Sold by:	SIMON & SCHUSTER
Format:	eBook
Pages:	672
Sales rank:	118,786
File size:	63 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

David 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 Lukas Prize and Pulitzer Finalist in History).

Hometown:

Washington, D.C., and Madison, Wisconsin

Date of Birth:

August 6, 1949

Place of Birth:

Detroit, Michigan

Education:

University of Wisconsin

Table of Contents

Preface 1

1 "The Stuff His People Are Made Of" 5

2 Path Lit by Lightning 20

3 "This Is the Indians Home" 38

4 High Jump 61

5 Athletic Duties above Everything 81

6 The Newest Star 91

7 Railroaded 114

8 Almost There 128

9 Stockholm 152

10 Near Custer's Tomb 183

11 Lo, the Poor Indian! 200

12 Among the Giants 219

13 Around the World 231

14 The Reckoning 254

15 The Myth of a Vanishing Race 263

16 Never Look Up 273

17 Gains 284

18 Losses 298

19 Gamblers 309

20 Start to Finish 319

21 Oorang Indians 340

22 Letters 1 354

23 Letters 2 363

24 World Famous Indians 372

25 Pick and Shovel 394

26 "A Man Has to Keep Hustling" 403

27 Akapamata in Hollywood 416

28 Never Forgotten 440

29 Road to Utopia 459

30 Thunderbirds 475

31 "Have You Seen the Movie?" 497

32 Waving Good-Bye 519

Epilogue 543

Gratitude 569

Notes 575

Selected Bibliography 627

Image Credits 629

Index 631

Editorial Reviews

05/30/2022

Biographer Maraniss (When Pride Still Mattered) trains his keen eye on the remarkable career of Jim Thorpe (1887–1953), “an archetype, the great athlete, and a stereotype, the romanticized noble Indian... a foundation story of American sports.” Through archival research, interviews, and oral histories, Maraniss assiduously unpacks the “making of the man and the creation of the myth” surrounding Thorpe, the Olympic champion decathlete in track and field, centering his heritage from the outset and offering a historical overview of the kinds of discourse that would plague the athlete from the Sac and Fox nation for the entirety of his career. Along the way, he reveals striking resonances between Thorpe’s legacy and that of Sauk leader Black Hawk, a fellow “American Indian mythologized into spectacle,” nearly 80 years earlier—lending a new light to the racism Thorpe found himself up against, particularly in regard to the stripping of his 1912 Olympic gold medals for violating the rules of amateurism by being paid to play in the minor leagues from 1909 to 1910. While much attention is given to the prejudices Thorpe faced—and, later, his struggles with alcoholism—Maraniss’s work offers an equally fascinating look at his subject’s outsize talent as a man who excelled in the realms of baseball, football, and athletics broadly, tacked onto a vivid backdrop of sports culture in the first half of the 20th century. This essential work restores a legendary figure to his rightful place in history. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

David Maraniss brilliantly rescues Jim Thorpe from myth and prejudice, restoring something more consequential than the Olympic medals stolen from him by small men—his humanity. This is another masterpiece from the master of biography.

Jane Leavy

"Throughout a book marked by deep research and expert context-setting, [Maraniss] sifts through the myths about Thorpe and Native Americans, depicting his subject as a proud, complicated man who sought to shape his own destiny, yet was bedeviled by larger forces of racism and hypocrisy. . . . Path Lit by Lightning tells his story with skill and integrity."

The Washington Post - Aram Goudsouzian

Goes beyond the myth and into the guts of Thorpe’s life, using extensive research, historical nuance and bittersweet honesty to tell the story of a gifted and complicated man. . . . Maraniss’ biography does justice to the struggles and triumphs of a truly great man.

Los Angeles Times - Mary Ann Gwinn

"A masterful, in-depth portrait of a monumental figure."

The Boston Globe - Louis Moore

Path Lit by Lightning showcases Mr. Maraniss’s abilities as an indefatigable researcher and a deft prose stylist. . . . [Reveals] Thorpe as a man in full, whose life was characterized by both soaring triumph and grievous loss.

The Wall Street Journal - Andrew R. Graybill

"In the new biography Path Lit by Lightning, David Maraniss details the enormous odds that a Native American hero had to overcome. . . . He insists that taken as a whole, Jim Thorpe’s story is not one of prejudice, nor the hypocrisy of others. . . . [And] emphasizes that whatever life took from him, Thorpe persisted and trained and worked and learned and succeeded."

The New York Times Book Review - Keith Olbermann

In different hands I might be dubious, but David Maraniss revives the titanic Jim Thorpe for a new generation with a surgeon’s care, the diligence of a great researcher, and the poignance and humanity that is the signature of his writing. Path Lit By Lightning is a masterful look at this country’s first super-athlete, unflinching from what conquest did to his people, from the rousing and bittersweet journey of fame and identity, nor from an American century often far less heroic than the book’s protagonist. It’s simply brilliant.

Howard Bryant

Path Lit by Lightning is a captivating book by a master storyteller. David Maraniss provides new insights into Jim Thorpe, a man who was not only ‘the world’s greatest athlete,’ but a cultural icon complicated by the dynamics of race and celebrity.

Patty Loew

Before Shohei Ohtani, before Michael Jordan and Bo Jackson, Jim Thorpe was the world’s best athlete, and David Maraniss tells Thorpe's extraordinary, tragic story with all of the power and detail that it deserves.

Buster Olney

Path Lit By Lightning is a flat-out masterpiece. The story of Jim Thorpe, one of America’s greatest and most misunderstood heroes, is told in riveting detail by David Maraniss, one of our greatest biographers. The result is a portrait as powerful, dazzling, and nuanced as Thorpe himself.

Jonathan Eig

07/01/2022

Pulitzer Prize—winning Washington Post editor Maraniss (Rome 1960: The Summer Olympics That Stirred the World), who's known for his best-selling biographies of Vince Lombardi, Roberto Clemente, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama, demonstrates with this latest biography that he moves easily between the worlds of politics and sports. His subject is the multisport phenom Jim Thorpe (1887–1953), whom ABC News has called the top American athlete of the 20th century. After growing up in Indian Territory (later Oklahoma) as a member of the Sac and Fox Nation, Thorpe earned All-American honors in college football, played pro football in its early days, and played several years of Major League Baseball. In the 1912 Olympics, Thorpe won gold medals for the pentathlon and decathlon, making him the first Indigenous American to win Olympic gold for the U.S. He was stripped of those medals the following year, however, when it was determined that he was not a true amateur because he had played semipro baseball. That turn of events would be the fulcrum of Thorpe's life, Maraniss argues here. VERDICT Maraniss's book is the most comprehensive Thorpe biography to date (being nearly 200 well-cited pages longer than Kate Buford's 2010 biography Native American Son). Beyond bringing Thorpe to life, Maraniss also delves heavily into issues of race and culture.—John Maxymuk

Library Journal

★ 2022-05-10
A sensitive and compelling life of the great, ill-treated athlete Jim Thorpe (1887-1953).

Born into the Sac and Fox Nation in Oklahoma, his birth name that of the title, Thorpe was an otherworldly athlete. As two-time Pulitzer winner and Washington Post associate editor Maraniss notes, Thorpe was so phenomenal that he remains “one of the few Native Americans of the twentieth century whom people could cite and praise even if they knew little else about the indigenous experience.” He excelled at every sport he played, making his coach at the Carlisle Indian School, Pop Warner, famous in the bargain. In 1912, Thorpe dazzled spectators at the 1912 Olympic Games in Stockholm, though his gold medals would soon be retracted after a newspaper reported that he had played pro baseball a couple of years earlier, violating the Games’ demands that participating athletes be amateurs. Maraniss rightly objects that in the aftermath, “most of the lies and feignings of innocence involved officials trying to save their own reputations, not his,” Warner and future U.S. Olympics head Avery Brundage among them. Thorpe spent the rest of his life trying to clear his name and have his Olympic record restored to him, alternating between poverty and one doomed business venture after another, moving from town to town to join various teams or escape his past. Of course, racism was a powerful element in Thorpe’s life, and Maraniss explores this topic with insight and nuance, just as he did in his biography of Roberto Clemente. Particularly pointed is the author’s closing anecdote about how Thorpe’s widow, apparently a skilled grifter, convinced a Pennsylvania town to rename itself after him with the promise of a well-funded hospital and other income-generating ventures; instead, it got his bones but nothing else.

A tale that, though well known in outline, Maraniss enriches with his considerable skills as a writer and researcher.

Kirkus Reviews