Stonehill Symposium Features Award-Winning Author

By Greg Pasciuto

Stonehill News Blog Staff

EASTON—Biographer T.J. Stiles was a featured guest on Saturday, September 21, at Stonehill College’s Oakes Ames Symposium.

           “I’m interested in the rise of the contemporary world,” he said during a break from the forum.

         Born near the town of Foley, Minnesota, Stiles graduated with a bachelor’s degree in history from Carleton College in 1986. Three years later, he completed graduate studies in European history at Columbia University. Although he ultimately discarded his original plan to enter academia, he quickly found a job at Oxford University Press in New York City, editing history anthologies and writing descriptions for published books.

           Stiles attributes this success to a friendship he made with an executive at Oxford.

         "It was a case of proximity,” he said. “Being in New York allowed the happy accident of getting a job in publishing to happen.”

       He worked with the company until 1995, when he got a job at Ballantine Books, owned by Random House. Four years later, he left to pursue writing full-time.

       Life as an author, Stiles admitted, is no easy task. However, he added that this was not necessarily due to a shortage of ideas to write about.

           “The struggles are overwhelmingly financial,” he said. “It’s difficult to make a living solely as an author.”

       Rising authors in the historical field must go through a process of applying for grants or fellowships in order to publish their work. Many also become public speakers to support themselves.

         Today, Stiles has authored three biographies. His research interests center on nineteenth-century American history. He received the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for biography for his portrayal of railroad magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt. In 2016, he won the Pulitzer Prize for history for his most recent book, Custer’s Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America.

           Stiles’ approach to writing biographies is rooted in his desire to uncover truth about the world. Inevitably, this means giving a voice to the historically voiceless.

           “Power and wealth in the past were distributed very narrowly,” he said. “The way we go about biographies, when we look at a powerful individual, we have to look at who else was in the room.”

        In the case of Custer, Stiles discovered that one such person was Eliza Brown, an African American woman who worked as a cook for Custer and his wife. Exploring her relationship with the Custers led Stiles down new paths of inquiry.

           “Focusing on [Eliza Brown] allowed me to explore questions of race, the role of women in society, and how women related to each other across the color line,” he explained.

           Stiles spoke for the final hour of the Oakes Ames Symposium. He placed Ames’ final years in the greater context, demonstrating the changing nature of history in the late nineteenth century. While not an expert on Ames himself, he was drawn to the symposium by the politician’s role in business history and how his contemporaries responded to economic developments.

         “I want to look at corporations at a time when people were not taking them for granted,” he said. “A time when they were arguing over their nature.”

          Summarizing why the study of history appealed to him so much, Stiles was succinct.

          “I want to understand the mental architecture of our universe,” he said.