Tony Hillerman: A Life

Product Description

The author of eighteen spellbinding detective novels set on the Navajo Nation, Tony Hillerman simultaneously transformed a traditional genre and unlocked the mysteries of the Navajo culture to an audience of millions. His best-selling novels added Navajo Tribal Police detectives Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee to the pantheon of American fictional detectives.

Morris offers a balanced portrait of Hillerman’s personal and professional life and provides a timely appreciation of his work. In intimate detail, Morris captures the author’s early years in Depression-era Oklahoma; his near-death experience in World War II; his sixty-year marriage to Marie; his family life, including six children, five of them adopted; his work in the trenches of journalism; his affliction with PTSD and its connection to his enchantment with Navajo spirituality; and his ascension as one of America’s best-known writers of mysteries. Further, Morris uncovers the almost accidental invention of Hillerman’s iconic detective Joe Leaphorn and the circumstances that led to the addition of Jim Chee as his partner.

Hillerman’s novels were not without controversy. Morris examines the charges of cultural appropriation leveled at the author toward the end of his life. Yet, for many readers, including many Native Americans, Hillerman deserves critical acclaim for his knowledgeable and sensitive portrayal of Diné (Navajo) history, culture, and identity.

At the time of Hillerman’s death, more than 20 million copies of his books were in print, and his novels inspired Robert Redford to adapt several of them to film. In weaving together all the elements of Hillerman’s life, Morris drew on the untapped collection of the author’s papers, extensive archival research, interviews with friends, colleagues, and family, as well as travel in the Navajo Nation. Filled with never-before-told anecdotes and fresh insights,
Tony Hillerman will thrill the author’s fans and awaken new interest in his life and literary legacy.
 

Review

“Skillfully written, Hillerman’s fans will want to give this a look.”
—Publishers Weekly
 

From James McGrath Morris—author of superb biographies—comes this remarkably rich, absorbing, and varied life of beloved mystery writer Tony Hillerman. With his canny eye for the telling detail, Morris tracks the author’s evolution from a poor Oklahoma boy growing up alongside members of the Citizen Potawatomie Nation to a reporter plying the streets of small towns and New Mexico’s state capital, a journey also marked by harrowing combat in the Battle of the Bulge.
Tony Hillerman is packed with insight into how a journalist revamped the mystery genre even as he became one of its most original and gifted practitioners, introducing readers to the extraordinary lifeways and beliefs of the Navajo and other Southwestern peoples. Providing a deft and nuanced look at issues surrounding cultural appropriation, this is a biography that becomes, as Hillerman termed facts transformed by imagination, “the stuff of art.”—
Caroline Fraser, author of
Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder
 

“James McGrath Morris’s
Tony Hillerman is beautiful and fascinating biography, not just the life of a remarkable writer but also a vivid depiction of the world that Hillerman grew up in—the American West, ranch and church, the war—and his career as a reporter and novelist that culminated, late in life, in international fame and best-sellerdom. Hillerman was a huge inspiration to me as a young writer. I truly love this book.”—
Douglas Preston, author of
The Lost City of the Monkey God and the Agent Pendergast series
 

“A towering figure in the realm of mystery fiction like Tony Hillerman is worthy of a biography of monumental proportions, a book that can encompass the grace, talent, and humanity of not only the man but his incredible body of work. James McGrath Morris’s
Tony Hillerman: A Life is that book—one of the most thoughtful, detailed, an