Custer's Trials (Pulitzer Prize Winner) by Tj Stiles

Custer's Trials (Pulitzer Prize Winner) by Tj Stiles

Winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for History

In this magisterial biography, T. J. Stiles paints a portrait of Custer both deeply personal and sweeping in scope, proving how much of Custer's legacy has been ignored. He demolishes Custer's historical caricature, revealing a capable yet insecure man, intelligent yet bigoted, passionate yet self-destructive, a romantic individualist at odds with the institution of the military (court-martialed twice in six years) and the new corporate economy, a wartime emancipator who rejected racial equality. Stiles argues that, although Custer was justly noted for his exploits on the western frontier, he also played a central role as both a wide-ranging participant and polarizing public figure in his extraordinary, transformational time-a time of civil war, emancipation, brutality toward Native Americans, and, finally, the Industrial Revolution-even as he became one of its casualties. Intimate, dramatic, and provocative, this biography captures the larger story of the changing nation. It casts surprising new light on one of the best-known figures of American history, a subject of seemingly endless fascination.

T.J. Stiles has held the Dorothy and Lewis B. Gilder Lehrman Fellowship in American History at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Gilder Lehrman Foundation. At the New York Public Library's Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, he lectured at Columbia University and served as an adviser for the PBS series The American Experience. His debut book, Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War, was a New York Times Notable Book and won the Ambassador Book Medal and the Peter Seaborg Award for Civil War Research. In 2009, The First Tycoon won the National Book Award. He has contributed to The New York Times Book Review, Salon.com, Smithsonian, and the Los Angeles Times, among other publications.

He currently resides in San Francisco. www.tjstiles.com is the author's website.