Laura Hillenbrand
Laura Hillenbrand was born in 1967 in Fairfax, Virginia, and grew up in an academic family; her father was a professor, and she was surrounded by books and the expectation of intellectual achievement from her earliest years. She attended Kenyon College in Ohio, where she studied history and developed the skills in archival research and analytical writing that would undergird her literary career. In 1987, during her junior year at Kenyon, she contracted a severe case of what was eventually diagnosed as chronic fatigue syndrome, an illness that would profoundly shape the next three decades of her life—confining her largely to her home, and for extended periods to her bed or a single room. It is one of the remarkable facts of her literary biography that both of her books, among the most exhaustively researched works of narrative nonfiction of their era, were written by a woman who could rarely leave her house.
Hillenbrand’s first book, Seabiscuit: An American Legend (2001), told the story of the legendary racehorse who captured the hearts of Depression-era Americans, and of the unlikely trio—a half-blind jockey, a damaged trainer, and a grief-stricken owner—who made him a champion. The book became a massive bestseller and won the PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing, establishing Hillenbrand as a writer of rare gifts: capable of making the history of horse racing feel as dramatically urgent as any thriller, and of rendering the interior lives of animals with a specificity that borders on the uncanny.
Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption (2010), available on Writers Review, is the book that confirmed Hillenbrand’s place among the most accomplished narrative nonfiction writers in America. The biography of Louis “Louie” Zamperini—Olympic runner, bombardier, plane crash survivor, prisoner of war, and ultimately survivor of years of torture in Japanese POW camps—is a work of almost overwhelming drama and meticulous historical reconstruction. Hillenbrand conducted hundreds of interviews, including extensive conversations with Zamperini himself, and worked from thousands of documents, letters, and military records to produce a narrative of staggering specificity. The book spent more than four years on the bestseller list, sold millions of copies worldwide, and was adapted for film by Angelina Jolie in 2014.
Hillenbrand writes with a visceral immediacy that places the reader inside the experience she is describing—inside the crashing plane, inside the rubber raft adrift in the Pacific, inside the POW camp. Her research is prodigious but never obtrusive; she wears it lightly, using specific details not to demonstrate her knowledge but to make the reader feel the texture of lived experience across time. She is particularly gifted at building and sustaining tension over long narrative arcs, and at rendering suffering without gratuitousness.
Laura Hillenbrand’s work stands as both a significant literary achievement and a remarkable personal triumph. Writing under the constant constraint of serious illness, she produced two books that have sold tens of millions of copies combined and introduced vast audiences to episodes of American history through individual lives told with unforgettable power. Her dedication to her craft under extraordinary physical circumstances has made her, for many readers and writers, something of an inspiration independent of the books themselves.
