Author Timothy Egan in conversation with Andrew Proctor
John Rudoff / OPB
A life-long Northwesterner, Egan has spent much of his career exploring his home region. One might even say he is the quintessential Pacific Northwest writer. He served as the first Pacific Northwest correspondent for the New York Times and he also wrote one of the definitive books about our region in 1990, “The Good Rain.”
During his eighteen-year tenure at the New York Times, Egan covered everything from the Exxon Valdez disaster to the OJ Simpson trial. In 2001, he and a team of reporters received a Pulitzer Prize for the series, “How Race is Lived in America.” Somehow, between reporting trips, he also found time to write multiple award-winning, best-selling books. He won the National Book Award in 2006 for “The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those who Survived the Great American Dustbowl,” which was a New York Times bestseller and led to a Ken Burns documentary.
Egan joined us to talk about his most recent book “A Fever in the Heartland: The Klu Klux’s Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman who Stopped Them.” Once again, Egan turns his attention to an American disaster—this time, a social and political disaster of monstrous moral proportions, tracing the swift rise and eventual collapse of the Klu Klux Klan in 1920′s Indiana. A place and time, he notes, “where one in three white males swore on a Bible to uphold white supremacy.”
“A Fever in the Heartland” is rigorously researched, and deeply -- overwhelmingly -- troubling. As a reader, it is not hard to draw parallels between these events that occurred a century ago, and all that is happening now. Egan himself said, in a recent interview, “I’m a big believer in the line that history doesn’t repeat itself but it rhymes.” But, to explore such a dark chapter in our history requires a firm belief in our potential as a country and as a species. The only way to rise to that potential is to see ourselves clearly and learn from our past.
Bio:
Timothy Egan is an American journalist and author of ten books. The most recent, “A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan’s Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them,” was an immediate New York Times bestseller. Egan worked for The New York Times for 18 years, first as the Pacific Northwest correspondent, and then as a national enterprise reporter. As part of a team of reporters Egan won the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting in 2001 for writing a series called “How Race is Lived in America.” Egan lives in Seattle with his family.