Path Lit by Lightning: The Life of Jim Thorpe

by David Maraniss

Born in 1887, in the Indian Territory of what later became Oklahoma, Thorpe was the quintessential underdog who rose from nowhere to become the greatest athlete in the world, the Natural who could do anything on the fields of play.

Thorpe’s life spanned a sixty-five-year period when the dominant society believed the best way to deal with Indians was to rid them of their Indianness and make them as white as possible.

In the years after his playing skills faded, his life was troubled by alcohol, broken marriages, deferred dreams, lost opportunities, and financial distress resulting from a generosity that lapsed into wastefulness. He was the American nomad, migrating from job to job, state to state, in search of a peace he never found before he died of a heart attack in a trailer park in southern California in 1953 at age sixty-five.