we know about the hardships whether we want to or not because of the press barely know about corruption tickets fixed because of the price. we know it's on the public agenda and sometimes like the fiscal cliff we hear about over and over again. these are critically important roles in the story is a reminder of that, they guess these are businesses run by the sauce burgers come in "new york times," but they perform this enormously important civic action of an army knife. the question we have to do as a society is that these papers, what will come to replace them. that will be part of that other people take away. >> this year's pulitzer prize went to a author t.j. for his boat, custer's trials to life on the frontier of the new america appeared he was on booktv in march or march coverage of folk

festival.e. >> hello, everyone. my name is bought and her husband. i am a professor over at the university of new mexico, just to the east here in arizona today. welcome to the eighth annual tucson festival of the books. we want to especially thank c-span, booktv for sponsoring this venue. about 40 minutes, and then we'll open it up for questions from the audience, and please go over to the microphone there to our -- on either side to do your questions. ..

you let people to buy your books. >> it helps me write. >> good. >> because you are enjoying the festival, we hope you remembered the friend program. your donation allows us to offer programming free of charge the public and support criticall literary program in the community. he, a friend today by visiting the student union are going to her website. a your gift makes a difference. of course you are doing now. i don't need to tell you what a fabulous book festival you have here in tucson. it is just absolutely marvelous. i have respect for the authors in your fellow audience members, let me say to you what i say to my students as i begin every lecture at the university of new mexico. i don't know why you have your thoughts with you.ou try a miscommunication with the outside world. lose yourself in the world of books. please put them on mute.

we were here together on this stage four years ago or so. it was probably more than not. the years go by so quickly. you had just won the pulitzer prize and the national book award for your fabulous biography of vanderbilt, the first take on the epic length of cornelius vanderbilt. before that you had written jesse james, the last rebel, which was very well received. and of course, your current book is custer's trials, life on the frontier of new america and all of them are published in t.j. lives in berkeley, california with his family. of course you are depicting a prizes again. i learned last night he won the western writers of america is for a word for biography.t. congratulations on not.

[applause] >> as i mentioned, from people who know a lot and have written and read a lot about custer, >>'s very, very nice. >> 2012, michael o'keefe published a two-volume bibliography on george armstrong custer. there were 10,000 items in the annotated them all. 3000 of them were books. so i ain't the logical first question to begin with is t.j. why custer? >> i hate myself. no. [laughter] first of all, i had to say thank you for coming. i appreciate it. i love the chance to talk to readers and potential readers even more. also to have a conversation hutton, you is not just a great hoyton a and a great writer and has a become coming out this spring called "the apache wars"

it's phenomenal. so watch for that. so to have this conversation with a good historian and a good writer is terrific. there is -- i could easily go on and on and give a hoe spiel about custer and why by book is justified, but the subtitle complain mitt approach. sometimes you go into a subject because it hasn't been written about enough before, or you really feel like people have gotten it wrong, and is a say there's a lot of great writing as well as a lot roof writing about custer. my approach was to change the camera angle, and i'm very interested in how the modern united states came into being, and people have focused on these very high profile aspect-of-s of custers life, first, little big horn, which is not the focus of my book. focus on his western career, but also what i try to do is

contextualize the well-known parts with the -- the civil war is a huge part of my book -- with the lesser known parts of his life and to show how he was engaged in all kinds of ways with the making of modern america, and how his notoriety and his fame was very much base on things we don't associate with custer. things like race and federal power and the new literary culture, and the rise of the corporation and finance and wall street and the western story and the civil war story, and the place of women and to bring forward and emphasize the female characters in his life were so fascinating and their relationships with each other. i saw such a rich life and complicated and volatile. a new way of looking at hem that doesn't devalue the iconic parts but integrates it with things

people have known about but not focused on. >> you accomplished that task. when last we were here talking about vanderbilt, i was really just stunned by how beautifully written and what a magnificent work of research the vanderbilt book was. i guess it had to be to win both the pulitzer prize and the national book award. and i didn't know anything about vanderbilt, about custer is a character in all modesty, i know a lot about. and so what was -- what is even more astonishing to me, i learned so much from the vanderbilt book, but i learned from this custer book as well. i learned a new way to look at custer, and like the vanderbilt book, what you're really doing is expanding the whole boundary of biography. just want -- won the biography spur, and it is a book about

american history and the most tumultuous period, the civil war, reconstruction, the gilded age, and the closing of the american frontier, which custer's last stand is a climatic moment of. and so you treat, in fact, the most spectacular moment of custer's life, his death, which every other book seems to just focus on and head toward, in your epilogue, and i just thought that was an credibly bold decision but fits in nicely with the tone and structure of your book. >> that was a decision i came to very early on, is to not have a final chapter or final part of the book devoted to little big horn, but to try to treat it in a way that kind of reflects the experience that americans had, that it was something that took place offstage, that they're trying to figure it out after

the battle was over, and during the book, one reason why people like too write about cust iris because the letters and the personal information really allows a writer to get into his life and into -- even inside his head to a certain extent, because he wrote about what he thought and felt so much. a friend of his said there was just no doubt about what custer was thinking. what you saw is what you got. he was emotive and expressive and wrote so much and i couldn't write about jesse james or vanderbilt about, and his personal relationships, emotions, daily struggles, faults. but then after following such an interior biography and get to little big horn, ended the chapter with hill literally ridings over the horizon and libby with a waving goodbye, and

then the reno courted of inquiry a couple years later, now you suddenly are jared out of that very interior experience of his life and now you're in the position of americans as they try to figure out what went on. i i was inspired in the idea by not only my desire to say, this is not a book about the little big horn, but also to say -- to think about the effect that i had when i read the great book, "battle cry freedom" and this is something i read a review which made me think bit it, and made me think, yes, it's an experience i had. when you got to lincoln's assassination he doesn't describe it. he has -- ended one chapter in this marvelous hoyt of the civil war era, we john wilkes booth saying he is going to kill lincoln after he makes a speech saying maybe we should allow african-americans