Bio of james alexander thom
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“Because of a good librarian, I grew up on Dickens, Hemingway, Faulkner and Hugo. He tied their stories to the world they lived in and made them feel so important.”
Thom’s words “always put a reader in the place where you could smell the surroundings, taste the mood and feel the joy or pain,” Baumann said.
Nancy Niblack Baxter of Hawthorne Publishing said Thom “spent years on each novel, digging into obscure records, following the trails of George Rogers Clark and the ‘lost Miamis’ and Civil War soldiers himself.
In the east the sky was yellow and the horizon was blue-gray. If Mary Ingles wanted to ‘follow the river’ out of Indian captivity, Jim walked that very path to experience its rigors.”
Thom has been writing novels exclusively for the last 30 years and says he has not retired. Long Knife.
Although he will celebrate his 81st birthday this year, “I have another 20 years of work mapped out, so I’m going to be here awhile.”
By Linda Negro, Grassroots editor, Evansville Courier & Press
"James Alexander Thom is one of the finest historical novelist writing today....he cares passionately about getting it right, and has a gift for illuminating those forgotten but fascinating corners of the American past...." ----John Sugden Author of Tecumseh, A Life
"He puts flesh and blood on forgotten names and breathes life into the stale past.
And then, I'll swear, a flock of martins swooped down the past me toward the river. In 1975, he married his third wife internationalplatformspeaker Dr. Cody Sweet. He knows the devastation that the settlers will bring by over-hunting and clearing the land:
For years they had crowded the Shawnees off their lands farther east, until the nation had congregated here in the O-hi-o lands above the great Speh-leh-weh-se-pe, the Beautiful River—the O-hi-o-se-pe, as it was called by most peoples....
Throughout this journey, Thom inserts brief details of an Indiana landscape that once was. So he took a job in the advertising department at The Indianapolis Star while attending night school at Indiana University at Indianapolis and, later, Butler University, to pursue his love of writing.
Thom graduated in 1961 and began work as a police reporter for the Star.
There was no Falls on the Ohio anymore, nor any Corn Island; locks and dams and erosion, I knew, had smoothed them out many decades ago. "Do you not remember," he asks his wife, "that half the nation long ago had moved beyond the Great River? (3)
At the end of the novel, Thom offers his own comments on the present Indiana landscape, in comparison to its former state:
The air was dirty.
"But in the long run, they will all be dead, the land will still be here, and all their paper will have proved to be just so much expensive mulch" (np). Far below the hawk there spread miles of lowland covered with water on both sides of the river, and where no currents ran there was white-edged ice. Smokestacks jutted into the horizon.... The wide river was slate-gray, fast, and eddying....
Thom served as the editor for the Indianapolis Nuggets magazine.
My new email address is [email protected]Contact me by email for book orders, lecture requests, etc.
In the Spring 2014, I was inducted into the Indiana Journalism Hall of Fame (I was a newspaper and magazine journalist and a lecturer at the Indiana University School of Journalism before becoming a full-time auther.)My textbook "The Art and Craft of Writing Historical Fiction," first published by Writer's Digest Books, was selected by the Indiana State Library in 2011 as Best Book on Nonfiction.In 2009, I was the inaugural winner of the annual Indiana Author's Award, National Category.A memoir is in progress; it will be published in 2015 by Hawthorne Press.(527)
He strives to show that the landscape of the Ohio River Valley has changed from an area filled with trees and scenic views during Clark's time to an area heavily impacted by human activity.