Writer and Historian T.J. Stiles

On PBS:
Aired February 4, 2008:
T.J. Stiles served as advisor and on-screen expert for the film "Grand Central," a documentary in the PBS series American Experience.

More About the Author:
A Brief Autobiography by T.J. Stiles
I was born and raised in Minnesota, just outside of the town of Foley (pop. 1,200), where my father was one of two doctors and was the Benton County coroner. It was (and is) a farming community, a landscape of dairy and hog farms.

My father attended Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, in the 1950s, and liked to claim a relation to one of the James-Younger gang, William Stiles, who was killed on the streets of Northfield in 1876. (Despite a remarkable resemblance between my father and the hapless outlaw, there is almost certainly no relation.) I attended Carleton as well decades later, but—despite the annual reenactment of the foiled robbery on the streets of Northfield—I gave Jesse James little thought.

After I graduated from Carleton with distinction in history, I accepted a fellowship to attend the graduate school of Columbia University in New York, where I studied European history, with a focus on agrarian societies and political violence. After I completed coursework, wrote a master's thesis, passed oral examinations, and received two graduate degrees (M.A. and M.Phil.), I decided not to write a dissertation. I had become much more interested in American history and identity than European, and I felt myself increasingly alienated from academia, as much as I appreciated the training as a historian that I had received. I still valued knowledge and study, but had become increasingly focused on the craft of writing.

After leaving graduate school, I began to work for Oxford University Press, as I studied American history independently. (Fortunately for me, during my years at Oxford the press published many leading American historians, whose books I worked on.) Soon I began to write my own works, authoring a five-volume series of historical anthologies. Each volume recounted a period in American history through first-person accounts drawn from primary sources, interwoven with my own narrative. I also wrote articles for the Smithsonian, and essays that were published by the Denver Post and the Los Angeles Times. Meanwhile I continued to work in publishing full-time.

As my anthology series drew to a close, I cast about for a way to write a large-scale narrative about the passage of the United States through the Civil War and Reconstruction. After considering different approaches, one particular subject came to mind. One of my first freelance projects had been a piece of research for a children's book on Jesse James (in which I essentially summarized the biography by William Settle, then the only serious book on the subject), and I included a chapter on Missouri's guerrilla warfare in my anthology on the Civil War. As I investigated further, I came to the conclusion that Jesse James had been sorely underestimated as a significant, purposeful, political figure, and so this biography was born.

The Civil War, not anti-railroad populism, was the key to understanding him, I believed; as I researched the book in full, I discovered that this was even more the case than I had initially thought. More than that, James remains an American icon—a challenging subject for a writer—and had never received the nonfiction treatment he deserved. I received a contract from Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., to write the book, and spent approximately four years in total on it, including three spent researching and writing full-time. My research took me from Missouri to North Carolina to Washington, D.C., as I followed up citations from other works (including Ted Yeatman's fine work on the James brothers) and discovered new evidence. (See my essay on new sources in my book, on the Essays page.)

Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War received an incredibly generous reception both in the United States and abroad. By the time the book appeared, however, I had already started work on my next biography, which has occupied my time ever since. It is about Commodore Vanderbilt (1794-1877), the first great corporate titan in American history, and the first to be called a "robber baron." The Next Book page provides more details on the project, also to be published by Knopf, but this new biography has some interesting similarities to my work on Jesse James. Despite Vanderbilt's great significance and iconic stature (or statue, since a twelve-foot bronze likeness of the Commodore still stands in front of Grand Central Station), he has been the subject of only one serious biography, a piece of business history written in 1942. Like Jesse James, the Commodore was a man of action who left no papers behind, just a few letters scattered in various collections. And like Jesse James, Vanderbilt often wished to conceal his activities. But he was, of course, a far more public figure, and there is far more material to work with than there was with a man who lived underground for his entire adult life.

The reception given to my last book, and the great need for a book about Vanderbilt, has led to some invaluable assistance as I work on this next project. I was selected as a mentor for the Hertog Research Fellowship at Columbia University's School of the Arts, in which an MFA student in nonfiction creative writing worked as my research assistant. I also taught a master class in the same subject at Columbia. For the 2004-05 academic year, I was honored with selection as Gilder Lehrman Fellow in American History at the New York Public Library's Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. Though I have conducted research at perhaps two dozen different libraries and archives, I made the New York Public Library my research home, where I devoted many hours to the New York Central Railroad papers, among other collections.

The city of New York was my home for twenty years, from 1986 to 2006. I moved more than a dozen times since arriving there, living everywhere from West Harlem during the height of the crack epidemic to Park Slope, Brooklyn, during its rise from the old family neighborhood that Paul Auster made semi-famous to an upscale residence for Wall Street couples buying their first brownstones. I was in Brooklyn on September 11, 2001, making revisions to my Jesse James manuscript, when the burning smell of the World Trade Center entered my apartment. I last lived just off Riverside Drive on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. At the beginning of the summer of 2006, I moved with my fiancée to California. We were married on July 3, 2006, at Kirkwood, California, a spot regularly visited by gold rush migrants to California, near Lake Tahoe. We now live in San Francisco, in the historic Presidio national park. In October 2007, our son Dillon was born in San Francisco.

Though my primary work has been writing for some time, over the years I have poured concrete for hog pens, served as a 4-H program assistant, toiled on a line at an electroplating plant, served as a janitor in the basement of the American Standard building, made telemarketing cold calls, manned the till at an inner-city liquor store, and filled tanks, fixed tires, and changed oil in a gas station, among other jobs.

A lifelong athlete, I was a co-captain of my high school football team, as well as a two-time district-champion wrestler. When I was sixteen, I also started to practice traditional Japanese Shotokan karate. I have a fourth-degree black belt from the Japan Karate Association, and participated successfully in national and world tournaments until I retired from competition in 1999. I have continued to practice and teach karate, and for twenty years I taught a club at Columbia University that I founded as a graduate student.

T.J. Stiles is the author of Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War, and is currently completing a biography of Cornelius "Commodore" Vanderbilt. He has written for the New York Times Book Review, Smithsonian, Salon.com, the Los Angeles Times, and other publications. He served as historical advisor and on-screen expert for "Jesse James" and "Grand Central," two films in the PBS documentary series American Experience. A native of Benton County, Minnesota, Stiles studied history at Carleton College and Columbia University, and resided in New York City for twenty years. He now lives in the Presidio in San Francisco with his wife and son.