David Maraniss, Ink in Our Blood

In this episode, David turns the tables and interviews his son, Andrew Maraniss, who is also a nonfiction author whose work focuses on the connections between sports and social action. His first book, STRONG INSIDE, was an illuminating biography of Perry Wallace, the trailblazing athlete who became the Jackie Robinson of the Southeast Athletic Conference.  His next book, GAMES OF DECEPTION, recounted the experiences of the U.S. basketball team at the sport's inaugural appearance at the Olympics - in Nazi Berlin in 1936. In this interview, David asks Andrew about his approach to research and writing, his emphasis on reaching young readers, and the messages of empathy and activism in his work. Andrew's books have received critical acclaim beyond the world of sports and many awards - including the Lillian Smith Award for civil rights, the RFK Book Awards Special Recognition Prize, and the Sydney Taylor Book Honor for depicting the Jewish experience.

In this episode, Sarah asks David about his routine as a writer. Using his book on the 1960 summer Olympics, Rome 1960, they go through each step of David’s process from getting an idea for a book, proposing it to his editor, through research, writing, and editing.  David explains his meticulous process for organizing notes, transcribing interviews and what he learned about organization from the great biographers Taylor Branch and Robert Caro. Sarah and David discuss his routine for each day, his tricks for how to jump-start writing sessions and why his Pulitzer-prize winning colleague, Anne Hull, brought him a tuna fish sandwich days after 9/11. David discusses his wife Linda’s role in his routine, his late parents’ dualing editorial roles as early readers of his manuscripts and how he almost lost his only copy of an early manuscript for When Pride Still Mattered. 

In this second episode of Ink in our Blood, Sarah talks to her dad, David Maraniss, about growing up as the son of a “Newspaper Man.” Long before David won the Pulitzer Prize, and wrote best-selling biographies on Vince Lombardi, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Roberto Clemente, he watched his father, Elliott Maraniss, manage The Capital Times, the afternoon paper in Madison, Wisconsin. The son of a printer in Brooklyn’s Coney Island, Elliott knew every angle of a newspaper, from layout to headlines. David absorbed the sounds and sights of his father’s paper and the rhythm of life for a newspaper man in the 60’s. Those were the days of noisy typewriters, cigarette butts on the floor, teletype machines, and hot type. At the dinner table, he heard about the big stories of the day— a serial killer, JFK’s popularity with Midwest farmers, and a killer zoo elephant named Winkie.  When David arrived at The Washington Post in 1977, the technology had advanced to 6-ply carbon paper and then large computers built by Raytheon.  David tells Sarah about filing stories from earthquake ravaged Mexico, recognizing Bill Clinton’s rising political power, and learning the ropes from the Post’s Ben Bradlee. 

In this first episode, Sarah asks her father, Pulitzer-prize winning journalist and author of 12 books, David Maraniss, about his motto: Go there, wherever there is. Searching for the truth as an author and The Washington Post journalist has taken David around the world, and what he finds in each place is as much about the people and sense of those locations as it is about the geography. David tells Sarah about moving to Green Bay, Wisconsin, for the winter to research his biography of Vince Lombardi. Finding “Billy” Clinton’s Great Aunt working at a Motel 6 near Hot Springs. Walking a battlefield in Vietnam with the American and Viet Cong commanders, four decades after their battle. And standing in a narrow street outside Jakarta, where the exotic sounds and smells once surrounded a young Barack Obama’s before his remarkable journey to the white house. 

Go there is one of four legs David says make up his approach. The others are: get all the archival documents, interview as many people as you can find, and break through the mythology in the search of truth.