How great biographers research, organize, and write epic lives

Executive overview

Writing a 700-page biography over a decade requires systems that outsmart memory and structure that enables improvisation. David Maraniss, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, discusses his process through the lens of his Jim Thorpe biography.

Discipline creates the freedom to improvise — without it, creative latitude becomes paralysis.

Research and organization methods

• Maraniss transcribes his own interviews rather than delegating, using the act of writing to embed material in memory
• Notes go into three-ring binders, then get consolidated into a master notes document — a second pass that reinforces recall
• He sketches each chapter's "stations of the cross" in a large artist sketchbook — the key points and how to move between them
• He stops short of Rick Atkinson-style outlines longer than the book itself; he leaves room for the creative process to surface unexpected connections
• Once the discipline of structure is in place, he improvises within it — his "freedom through discipline" principle, borrowed from studying Vince Lombardi

Jim Thorpe: athletic greatness under impossible conditions

• Born 1887, Thorpe reached peak fame at the 1912 Stockholm Olympics — yet his athletic feats remain nearly in living memory through oral accounts
• He was simultaneously a football star, Olympic decathlete, and major league baseball player; Bo Jackson is the closest modern parallel
• He trained rigorously despite the persistent stereotype that Native American and Black athletes succeeded through natural talent alone
• He could watch another athlete perform a skill and immediately do it better — a rare combination of physical gifts and mental visualization
• Playing 60-minute games, offense and defense, traveling by train between cities, in heavy wool uniforms: the physical toll was compounded by none of modern sport's recovery advantages
• At 45, he was still hitting well for a traveling baseball team competing against Negro League clubs

The systemic injustice behind Thorpe's story

• His Olympic medals were stripped because he had played semi-pro baseball under his real name — while dozens of college athletes did the same under pseudonyms
• Pop Warner, who knew about the practice, later blamed Thorpe's "ignorance"; Thorpe wasn't corrupt enough to know the rules required deception
• Football was not segregated in Thorpe's era; he played against Paul Robeson and Fritz Pollard, and competed against future generals and presidents
• Native Americans were romanticized by white society even as they were subjected to genocide and forced assimilation — a distinction that gave Thorpe slightly more mobility than Black athletes, while still extracting an enormous personal cost
• The Carlisle Indian School motto — "Kill the Indian, save the man" — captured the mission: use football's social cachet to assimilate students into white culture while stripping them of language, religion, and heritage
• The school's athletes were celebrated for their exotic difference by the same press covering a school that existed to eradicate that difference

Writing biography: immersion, duality, and the love of process

• Maraniss becomes obsessed with each subject until the next one takes over; he once turned into a fire station mid-drive while mentally composing a chapter
• The Clinton biography taught him a key lesson: great subjects are not likeable or unlikeable — they are dual, and the biographer's job is to hold both sides without resolving the tension
• He spent two months consulting Native American scholars before writing the Thorpe book to test whether he was the right person to tell the story
• The figures he admires most — Clemente, Thorpe — are those he feared slightly because of his own admiration; the fear was a signal to be careful
• His editor Alice Mayhew didn't line-edit; she edited him — discussing larger meaning, defending the work fiercely, and providing the encouragement that made the difference
• COVID removed travel and distraction and revealed how much productive writing time had been lost to delegatable obligations
• Writer's block, for a trained journalist, is a symptom of insufficient research — not a creative problem