David Maraniss is a New York Times best-selling author, fellow of the Society of American Historians, and visiting distinguished professor at Vanderbilt University. He has been affiliated with the Washington Post for more than forty years as an editor and writer, and twice won Pulitzer Prizes at the newspaper. In 1993 he received the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for his coverage of Bill Clinton, and in 2007 he was part of a team that won a Pulitzer for coverage of the Virginia Tech shooting. He was also a Pulitzer finalist three other times, including for one of his books, They Marched Into Sunlight. He has won many other major writing awards, including the George Polk Award, the Robert F. Kennedy Book Prize, the Anthony Lukas Book Prize, and the Frankfurt eBook Award. A Good American Family is his twelfth book. He and his wife Linda, a retired environmentalist, live in Washington, D.C., and Madison, Wisconsin, their home town.

Tell us about how you approach writing a new book? If I’m going to write a book, I have to be obsessed with the topic. I’m not going to just write a book about a famous person. So I’m always looking for two things — a dramatic story, and themes that illuminate the sociology and history of America.

I talk about the four legs of the table that I use for writing. The first leg is to go there, wherever “there” is for my book. In 1996, I turned to my wife and uttered those immortal loving words, “How would you like to move to Green Bay for the winter?”, to which she responded, “Brr.” But I realized that to do the book on Lombardi, I had to move to Green Bay. I had to experience what it was like in this company town where everything was Packers.

Who are some writers that have inspired you?
I’ve had a few writers who I’ve learned from and followed and admired. The first was my father, who was a lifelong writer and editor. He had a way of writing in an engaging style that never wrote down to people, was very intelligent, but incredibly clear. I’ve always tried to do that.

The essays that have meant the most to me were those by George Orwell. He came into his writing with a political ideology, but it never blinded him, he was looking for the truth wherever it took him. I’ve always used his essays when I’m teaching young writers how to write. There’s one essay called “A Hanging.” It describes when he was a young policeman in Burma, watching a young Burmese man being led to the gallows. There’s a puddle in front of the person who’s about to get executed and he naturally steps aside so his bare feet don’t go in the puddle. Orwell uses that moment as the most powerful argument against capital punishment that I’ve ever read, showing the human impulse of this man right before he’s about to be killed by the state. I’ve always looked for detail like that that illuminates something larger. Orwell taught me how to do that.