Path Lit by Lightning: The Life of Jim Thorpe
David Maraniss/Simon & Schuster/2022/672pp/IBSN: 9781476748412
From Abner Doubleday supposedly introducing baseball in the cow pastures of Cooperstown to the more recent conversation over whether Michael Jordan’s famed “Flu Game” should actually be referred to as the “Food-Poisoned Game” (or even the “Hangover Game”), as discussed in the 2020 documentary The Last Dance, myth has long been intertwined with American sports. It’s a tradition as quintessentially American as Davy Crockett, John Henry, and the cow of Mrs. O’Leary.
David Maraniss’s Path Lit by Lightning: The Life of Jim Thorpe is not merely a comprehensive recounting of the life of a fabled athlete, but it serves as a deliberate investigation of the myths that have long obscured arguably America’s most legendary and greatest athlete.
In discussing Thorpe, whose achievements surpass those of any American athlete in both range and impact, Maraniss constructs a sweeping biography that reaches back before Thorpe’s birth, diving into the history of the Sac and Fox Nation and Thorpe’s lineage and place within it, and it extends decades beyond his death, tracing not only his legacy in family, film, and sports, but the legal battles over Thorpe’s remains, some sixty years after his final breath, and everything in between. The result is a biographical portrait as probing as it is expansive, allowing readers the space and information to learn and reconsider an American icon.
Understanding Jim Thorpe’s story requires navigating a period in American history shaped as much by mythmaking as by memory. In the world of athletics in the early 20th century, influential sportswriters like Ring Lardner and Grantland Rice helped construct the heroic narrative of Thorpe’s extraordinary talent. Yet, it is within the same media space that celebrated his achievements that also perpetuated stereotypes that framed Native Americans as incapable of adapting to a “white man’s nation” and a rapidly changing century.
Descriptions of the college football team Thorpe led, the Carlisle Indian Industrial School (an Indian boarding school), routinely relied on tropes such as students being “on the warpath,” and, as Maraniss repeatedly notes, sportswriters often invoked the condescending refrain “Lo, the Poor Indian” to characterize native people, revealing the contradictory and racialized discourse that shaped Thorpe’s public image.
In a world where Thorpe crossed paths and rubbed shoulder pads with Dwight D. Eisenhower, Paul Robeson, Fritz Pollard, Pope Pius X, Bob Hope, and even spent time aboard the ill-fated RMS Lusitania, the writing is remarkably accessible, shaped by an easy-to-read style that invites readers in without sacrificing depth. Its simplicity allows the audience to understand and grapple with complex ideas while still preserving an effortless readability.
Thorpe’s rise unfolds at the dawn of the 20th century, a moment when American sports were just beginning to take on a new cultural significance. And more than a century after he carved his name into the history books at the 1912 Olympics, many of the conversations that surrounded Thorpe in his time continue to echo today: the meaning of amateurism in college athletics, the appropriate role of sports within higher education, a generational divide between past-era athletes and fans debating their modern counterparts over the evolving nature of the game, and, of course, the enduring conversations about race that shape both public perception and institutional practice.
This is not even to mention Thorpe’s efforts to secure representation for Native Americans in the film industry, and how Maraniss shares this unheralded chapter of Thorpe’s post-playing days, highlighting how he challenged the limited, often stereotypical roles offered to Indigenous actors and worked to ensure more authentic portrayals on screen. Beyond his legendary athletic feats, Thorpe emerges as a figure acutely aware of the cultural narratives surrounding him, and yet, he also navigated the expectations of white audiences, at times donning the stereotypical garb of an “American Indian” to meet their perceptions, with nary a fight.
This instance represents a complex figure, and not to mention his relationship with his three wives and eight children, which is at once heartbreaking in its absences and yet present in the ways he sought to provide and support them.
Thorpe’s life resists simple categorization: he was a trailblazing athlete, a keenly aware cultural negotiator, and a man navigating the demands of family, fame, and identity. A Path Lit by Lighting: The Life of Jim Thorpe captures these tensions with empathy and nuance, allowing readers to appreciate and understand both Thorpe’s extraordinary accomplishments and the human vulnerabilities that accompanied them, ultimately portraying Thorpe as a figure whose legacy continues to resonate in multiple, sometimes conflicting, dimensions. David Maraniss presents these struggles with the same clarity and nuance that permeate the rest of the narrative, painting a portrait of a man whose influence extended far beyond the playing field.
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Reviewer Matthew Johnson is author of Shadow Folks and Soul Songs (Kelsay Books), Far from New York State (NYQ Press), and Too Short to Box with God (Finishing Line Press). His poetry has appeared/is forthcoming in The African American Review, Apple Valley Review, Heavy Feather Review, London Magazine, and elsewhere. A recipient of multiple Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominations, as well as a finalist for the Diverse Book Award (Grand View University) and E.E. Cummings Poetry Award (New England Poetry Club), he is the managing editor of The Portrait of New England and the poetry editor of The Twin Bill. Website: www.matthewjohnsonpoetry.com.
