T. J. Stiles won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for History for his book "Custer's Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America." In his biography, Stiles demolishes George Armstrong Custer’s historical caricature and says that the key to understanding Custer is that he lived on a frontier in time. In the Civil War, the West, and many areas, Custer helped to create modern America, but he could never adapt to it. He freed countless slaves, yet rejected new civil rights laws. He tried to make a fortune on Wall Street, yet never connected with the new corporate economy. Native Americans fascinated him, but he could not see them as fully human. A popular writer, he remained apart from Ambrose Bierce, Mark Twain, and other rising intellectuals. During Custer’s lifetime, Americans saw their world remade. His admirers saw him as the embodiment of the nation’s gallant youth, of all that they were losing; his detractors despised him for resisting a more complex and promising future.
*The third segment of Access Utah contains language that some listeners may find objectionable*
In addition to “Custer’s Trials,” T.J. Stiles is the author of “The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt,” which received the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for biography and 2009 National Book Award for nonfiction, and “Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War,” winner of the Ambassador Book Award and the Peter Seaborg Award for Civil War Scholarship. An elected member of the Society of American Historians, he served on the 2012 faculty of the World Economic Forum, was a 2011 Guggenheim fellow in biography, and was the first Gilder Lehrman Fellow in American History, 2004–05, at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. He lives in Berkeley, California, with his wife and children.
This program is made possible by a grant from the Pulitzer Prizes Centennial Campfires Initiative for a collaboration between UPR, Utah Humanities, the Salt Lake Tribune, and KCPW. Campfires is a joint venture of the Pulitzer Prizes Board and the Federation of State Humanities Councils in celebration of the 2016 centennial of the Prizes. The initiative seeks to illuminate the impact of journalism and the humanities on American life today, to imagine their future and to inspire new generations to consider the values represented by the body of Pulitzer Prize-winning work. The Campfires Initiative is also supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Ford Foundation, Carnegie Corporation of New York, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Pulitzer Prizes Board, and Columbia University.
