Biography of tony hillerman author
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Tony Hillerman: A Life by James McGrath Morris
Norman. University of Oklahoma Press. 2021. 348 pages.
WRITTEN TOWARD THE end of his career as a novelist creating the incredibly successful Navajo mystery series, Tony Hillerman’s best-selling autobiography, Seldom Disappointed (2001), is notable for its calm acceptance, tinged with humor, of what life brought the author. Twenty years later, we have in Tony Hillerman: A Life what promises to be the authoritative biography.
In Seldom Disappointed, the passages on Hillerman’s war experiences on the European front are direct, unflinching, candidly detailing his conflicting feelings amidst the foul-ups (snafus) of combat. They are narrated without bitterness, even though his severe wounds were the result of an ill-advised advance over a known minefield. It seems he is writing from a position of self-harmony, a state of being that attracted him to the Navajo in the first place. In his new biography, Morris delivers the facts of Hillerman’s war years, adds context, and describes the writer’s perspectives, sometimes employing direct quotes to show their flavor. But it’s when Morris’s book moves away from the early years into Hillerman’s career as a professor at the University of New Mexico and an aspiring novelist that it g
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Biographer James McGrath Morris’s sixth nonfiction book will be published in October 2021 and for New Mexico mystery fans, the subject matter of this biography will be of great interest: Tony Hillerman. Tony wrote 18 novels set on the Navajo Nation.
His main characters, Joe Leaphorn, Jim Chee, and Bernadette Manuelito, are still solving crimes 13 years after his death, thanks to Tony’s daughter Anne, who has penned six best-selling novels in the series. Learn more about three writers in this conversation with James McGrath Morris and Neighbors magazine publisher Cheryl Fallstead.
You have written many biographies with subjects such as well-known people like Ernest Hemingway and Joseph Pulitzer, but also people whose names are not as well-known today, like journalist Ethel Payne and Charles Chapin, dubbed the Rose Man of Sing Sing. How do you select the subjects of your books?
It’s a little bit like dating. You see a subject you think is meritorious and deserving of a biography, and who has the elements of being able to be written about, meaning that they kept their papers or there’s enough of a record. There are some people who are significant historically who left nothing, so you can’t write about them.
Perhaps the most important, is it somebody you can live
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Tony Hillerman
“Skillfully written, Hillerman’s fans drive want progress to give that a look.”—Publishers Weekly
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“James McGrath Morris’s Tony Hillerman evolution beautiful predominant fascinating biogr