Daniel James Brown, Author of “The Boys in the Boat”
Today, my guest is Daniel James Brown, author of the New York Times best selling book The Boys in the Boat, a story about 9 working class boys who became the 1936 U.S. Men’s Olympic gold medal winning rowing team.
With a team composed of the sons of blue collar workers and led by Joe Rantz, a teenager without family or prospects, the University of Washington’s eight-oar crew team was never expected to defeat the elite teams of the East Coast and Great Britain, yet they did, going on to shock the world by defeating the German team rowing for Adolf Hitler.
The story is the subject of the documentary "The Boys of '36" by PBS's The American Experience and the MGM Award-Winning movie Boys in the Boat directed by George Clooney.
In this candid conversation, Daniel shared the real stories behind his accidental discovery of the 1936 Olympic rowing team, his meticulous writing process, and why the book's massive success has made it difficult to move on to his next project.
1. A Serendipitous Meeting. Daniel revealed that the story for The Boys in the Boat literally walked into his life when a neighbor named Judy asked him to meet her elderly father, Joe Rantz, who was living under hospice care. Fascinated by Joe's story of rowing in front of Adolf Hitler at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, Daniel completely committed to the project within 24 hours. Though Joe unfortunately passed away just a couple of months later, Judy had actually spent the previous five years taking meticulous notes on her father's life, providing an invaluable foundation of detailed documentation for the book.
2. The Golden Era of Sports Writing. To build out the narrative, Daniel embarked on a massive research project, conducting hundreds of hours of interviews with the families of the other eight rowers who eagerly supplied boxes of diaries and letters. He also benefited greatly from the fact that 1930s rowing was an enormously popular spectator sport; the era's newspapers were filled with beautifully written, hyper-detailed articles about the athletes' conditions and coaches' strategies. This rich research allowed him to weave in unexpected, fascinating characters like George Pocock, a sagelike wooden boat builder who deeply influenced the young men.
3. The Challenge of Restraint. Daniel's writing process took about four and a half years, beginning with a full year of research just to create a comprehensive 12-page timeline of overlapping events in America and Germany. He tackles his books chronologically by heavily researching a specific scene, writing it, and then putting it in a drawer to age before revising it later. Because the history was so vast, his absolute biggest challenge was "restraint"—for example, he became so obsessed with how the Nazis used the Olympics for propaganda that he wrote four times more than necessary and eventually had to cut most of it out.
4. A Hunger for Teamwork. When analyzing the wild, unexpected success of the book, Daniel believes it resonates deeply because modern readers have a real hunger for positive stories about humans pulling together as a team to achieve greatness. While he finds it incredibly rewarding to see how the book has touched people's lives—such as families reading it to dying parents or giving it to injured veterans—he admits the success has become somewhat of a hurdle. Because he has spent three years continuously traveling and talking about the book, the story remains so alive in his head that it has been incredibly difficult to clear his mind and let a new story take hold.
