When I was a kid, local television stations showed old black and white movies back to back into the early morning hours on weekend nights. I saw some of my favorite pictures for the first time by staying up until 3 in the morning to watch; and one of the pictures I remember best was “They Died with their Boots On.” It starred Errol Flynn as George Armstrong Custer and Olivia DeHavilland as his wife Libbie.

The movie portrayed Custer as a great hero of the West, a romantic figure with his long, flowing blond locks and his custom-made buckskin jackets.  One of the most famous scenes from that movie – and one that moved me as I watched in my darkened living room - is the farewell between Custer and his wife as he prepares to ride off to the Little Big Horn. It’s filled with ominous music and forebodings of doom that flash between the young frontier couple. A short time later, we see Custer valiantly try to fight off the Indian hordes until he is finally struck down along with all of his men.  It was that movie which gave me an impression of Custer that lasts to this day. T.J. Stiles, our guest on today’s show, says that Americans know very little about Custer other than how he met his demise in one of the most famous massacres in American history. Stiles sets out to tell the larger story of Custer - a celebrated hero of the Civil War, a failed businessman,  an unfeeling tyrant to his men later in his military career and a philanderer who was haunted by his disrespectful behavior toward the wife he loved. He also may have been responsible for one of the worst atrocities of the Indian wars - the slaughter of a band of Indian men, women and children at the Washita River in Montana Territory.

Stiles has written a compelling new biography of Custer called “Custer’s Trials; A Life on the Frontier of a New America” in which he tries to fill in the blanks in our understanding of George Armstrong Custer.

I hope you enjoy the show!


1.23.16 Author TJ Stiles on "Custer's Trials" PT 2

1.23.16 Author TJ Stiles on "Custer's Trials" PT 1

I first read “The Great Gatsby” when I was in college. I have to admit, I was disappointed. It just didn’t seem to me at the time to be the Great American novel that so many think it is.

But I read it again about two years ago, when my daughter Emma was reading it in her high school lit class. It moved her deeply. She told me it was the best book she’d ever read. And so, I thought I should give F. Scott Fitzgerald another look. I can’t explain why I fell in love with Gatsby the second time around, but I did. I now realize what a great writer Fitzgerald really was.

His life with Zelda was the stuff of legends. They were the Jazz Age glamor couple until her fragile psyche crumbled and Scott committed her to a series of mental hospitals.  She ended up alone in a hospital in Asheville, North Carolina. He went to the West Coast, where he tried to earn a living as a screenwriter, and became one of the fixtures on the glamorous social scene that helped define the Golden Age of Hollywood. Scott’s friends were legends, too: Dorothy Parker, Earnest Hemingway, Humphrey Bogart, and many more.

I learned all this when Stewart  O’Nan’s novel “West of Sunset” landed on my desk some time ago. O’Nan tells the story of the last three years of Fitzgerald’s life, spent in Los Angeles; and he introduces us to the fabled world that Fitzgerald inhabited.

It’s a wonderful book, and I really enjoyed having Stewart here to discuss it. I hope you like the conversation!

Author Stewart O'Nan on "West of Sunset!"

As we were finishing production on this week’s show, the bulletin crossed the wires announcing the death of Harper Lee at age 89. She was a giant of American literature and one of the most important chroniclers of the evolution of the American South in the mid-twentieth century.

This is the conversation we had at the time the book was published last summer, with Joseph Crespino and Chuck Reece. Crespino is the Jimmy Carter Chair of American and Southern History at Emory University. Reece is the editor of the online magazine Bitter Southerner.

Harper Lee Remembered

Dr. Randy Martin is one of the world’s foremost authorities on echo cardiology. When he talks about the mysteries of the heart, we feel his passion; but he is able to communicate the intricacies of his work in language we all can understand.   

Dr. Randy Martin on Heart Health and Wellness

Every week, Bill Nigut engages in compelling conversations with authors, artists, historians, leaders in science, technology and business, eccentric characters, celebrities and more. They are the people who give the South its unique texture and flavor. What you’ll hear will often surprise you…make you laugh… or leave you feeling just a little bit smarter. Good conversation really is a Two Way Street, talking and listening; and that’s the element that drives every episode of the show.

GPB's Two Way Street

Popular tracks