One Thursday earlier this month, David Grann schlepped into Manhattan from Westchester, and I from New Jersey, to catch up before the October 20 theatrical release of Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, based on Grann’s acclaimed 2017 book of the same name. That evening, Grann was scheduled to moderate a conversation with Lawrence Wright, his Austin-based New Yorker colleague and the author of a new novel called Mr. Texas. Their event was at the Rizzoli Bookstore on 26th and Broadway, so we met in Madison Square Park beforehand and grabbed a table near Shake Shack. Grann declined my offer of french fries and cracked open a grapefruit Spindrift, elbow-bumping in lieu of a handshake because he felt like he was coming down with a cold.
For a writer who plies his trade on the Mount Olympus of literary nonfiction, Grann is one of the most approachable people you’ll ever meet. (Disclosures all around as I sing his praises: I’m a fan, we’re friendly, and my wife also works at The New Yorker, which shares a parent company with Vanity Fair.) So you can’t begrudge the guy for hogging the New York Times best-seller list practically all year long.
Week after week, not just one but two of Grann’s books have made the list, and usually pretty high up—Killers because it’s been getting a second wind thanks to the Scorsese factor; and The Wager, an 18th-century shipwreck thriller, because it came out in April and, well, at this point, when a David Grann book comes out, it’s going to be a bestseller that’s picked up for an ambitious Hollywood production. (Scorsese is adapting The Wager too.) “I spent most of my reporting life struggling to make a living, really the majority of it,” Grann said. “In the last few years, because the films and the books have done better, I don’t have that struggle anymore. It’s a luxury.”
Killers of the Flower Moon, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro, cinematically restructures the narrative of the book, which exposed the systematic killings of dozens of members of the Osage tribe who had become wealthy from the oil discovered beneath their land. I’d recently learned about a controversy related to the teaching of the book, which is what prompted me to get in touch with Grann.
There’s a measure in Oklahoma called HB 1775. The broad language in the law, adopted in 2021 and similar to other CRT-type bills around the country, decrees that it is illegal in Oklahoma—the site of the 1920s Osage Indian murders chronicled in Killers—to “make part of any Course offered in a public school…discriminatory principles” such as, for instance, the notion that “an individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously”; or the idea that “any individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race or sex.”
HB 1775, now facing fresh scrutiny thanks to the arrival of the movie, has raised concerns among Oklahoma educators about whether they might run afoul of the law for assigning Grann’s book. In at least one Oklahoma high school, copies of Killers were purchased for an 11th-grade English class, only to sit unread after HB 1775 became law. An English teacher at the school, Debra Thoreson, felt it would be a professional risk to introduce discussions about race that are central to the story. “As soon as that passed,” she told The Oklahoman, “I realized I would be setting myself up for House Bill 1775 to take away my license.”
That’s what I wanted to talk with Grann about—Killers of the Flower Moon being swept up in America’s culture wars. “The idea that you can’t have free discussions that deal with history,” he said, “and create conversations that can sometimes cause discomfort in the sense that you’re dealing with hard truths—I mean, I don’t think you can be in our profession if you don’t believe in truth, history, and knowledge.”
Grann first heard about HB 1775 from some of his Osage Nation friends, whom he has remained in touch with ever since working on Killers. (He visits Oklahoma every year.) The news understandably disturbed him, and not just because of his proximity to it. “The point is not about my book,” he said. “The point is about history. These conversations are about Native American history, about the past experience of tribal nations in Oklahoma.”
Joe Pompeo
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