Welcome to the vast majority. I'm Jack Mendeppity Editor, Micah U-Tricks. One of the

best books I read in 2020 was Woody Guthrie, an intimate life by Gustave Stadler,

a portrait of a leftist folk singer who is hopefully familiar to you, the listener,

a famous figure in American culture in the 20th century, a radical, someone who's

music I personally find particularly compelling even as somebody who doesn't like folk music that much.

But this book is sort of more than just a biography of a guy who did great songs and had

some pretty good politics. It's also a portrait of a deeply human and you know deeply as the

subtitle indicates a deeply intimate figure that I found extremely personally compelling.

And I talked to Gustave Stadler, who is a professor of English at Haverford College,

about the book and about the life and times of Woody Guthrie. Here's our conversation.

Gus, welcome to the podcast. Thank you. I'm happy to be here. So it's kind of a lazy

interviewer question to start with this, but I'm going to ask anyway because I feel like the answer

might actually be interesting. Why did you decide to write this book? I mean, Woody Guthrie is

a storied American figure, somebody who many biographies have been written about and documentaries and

everything else. So why did you feel the need to add another biography to this pile of already

existing ones? Well, I came to it in a kind of a roundabout way, which is maybe why I didn't get

intimidated by the other biographies, but like I'm not historically like a huge folk music fan.

I admired what I knew of Woody Guthrie. My parents would listen to Pete Sieger sings

Woody Guthrie though. And so like, you know, I think they thought Woody Guthrie was a little too

punk or something. One of my scholarly fields of expertise is in the history of sexuality.

And I came to this, you know, Google Books, whatever excerpt from clients' biography,

Joe Klein's biography of Woody Guthrie that said that he had been in this center for the treatment

...