T.J. Stiles, who grew up in Foley, Minn., and graduated from Carleton College, has won his second Pulitzer Prize, this time for "Custer's Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America," a biography of Gen. George Armstrong Custer.
He was joined on the Pulitzers list by two other Minnesotans: Sacramento Bee political cartoonist Jack Ohman, who got his start at the University of Minnesota Daily, and Associated Press reporter Robin McDowell, part of a team who won the public service award for a series about slave labor in the seafood industry.
Stiles won his first Pulitzer in 2010 for "The First Tycoon," a biography of Cornelius Vanderbilt that also won a National Book Award.
"I'm just totally, utterly flummoxed," Stiles said by phone from his home in California. "I'm really, really happy, too. It's like a total bolt from the blue. ... They don't give out two [Pulitzers] almost ever"
When the director of promotions for Alfred A. Knopf called with the news, "I knew she wasn't playing a prank," he said, "but it was like — I just couldn't absorb it. I went on the Twitter feed to confirm it. I needed something visual."
Stiles acknowledged that there are a multitude of biographies of Custer already out there. "I have tremendous respect for all of the writing on Custer," he said. "It ranges from great literary masters and great historians and biographers — Robert Utley, Paul Andrew Hutton, I could go on and on. Shirley Leckie Reed, who now lives in St. Paul, wrote a tremendous biographer of Libby Custer, Custer's widow, and was enormously helpful."
But with his book, Stiles said, he "tried to change the camera angle." (Read the Star Tribune's review here.)
"I tried to integrate the well-known aspects of Custer's life — and there are many, most notably his role in the Indian wars — with lesser known elements of his career and his private life in way that hadn't quite been done before," he said. "One of the elements that's really underplayed is the issue of race. Much of my portrait is about his engagement with race on a personal level, on a political level and on a professional level."
