Andrew Maraniss ( ) is an American author, best known for his book, "Strong Inside: Perry Wallace and the collision of race and sports in the south", depicting Perry Wallace, the first African-American to play college basketball under an athletic scholarship in the Southeastern Conference (Vanderbilt University) in the 1960s. The book was on the New York Times best-seller list in both the sports and civil rights categories for four consecutive months. It received the 2015 Lillian Smith Book Award and a Special Recognition Award by the Robert F. Kennedy Book Awards Foundation.
Maraniss attended Vanderbilt University in 1992 on a Fred Russell-Grantland Rice Scholarship for Sports Journalism. He won the school's Charles Foster Alexander Award for excellence in journalism in 1992 and in 2016 was inducted in the Vanderbilt Student Media Hall of Fame. He was designated Vanderbilt's "Writer-in-Residence" in 2017. The popularity of the book reoriented his former career in public relations into that of full-time author. After Strong Inside, Maraniss published additional works including Games of Deception (2019), Singled Out (2021), and Inaugural Ballers (2022). Maraniss' father, David Maraniss, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and associate editor for The Washington Post.
Early life and family
Maraniss was born in Madison, Wisconsin, the son of David and Linda Maraniss who met there in high school. His grandfather, Elliott Maraniss, was editor of Madison's Capital Times newspaper in the 1970s. His grandmother, Mary Maraniss, was a 1966 graduate of the University of Wisconsin, Phi Beta Kappa, and book editor for the University of Wisconsin Press. Marannis' father, David, has been associate editor of The Washington Post'''' since 1977 and won a Pulitzer prize for national reporting in 1993 for his coverage of Bill Clinton's candidacy during the 1992 presidential election. The senior Maraniss said that his son Andrew "has always been more mature than Linda and I", a child who would save his candy rather than eat it all at once. When Andrew was young, his father was a budding journalist who found a job at the Trenton Times in New Jersey, that necessitated the family's move from Wisconsin to the east coast. In the 1970s another job opened up at The Washington Post so they moved to Washington, D.C. As a youth in the late 1970s, Andrew attended press conferences with his father. When Maraniss was in high school, his father was transferred to Austin, Texas, to serve as southwest bureau chief for the Post.
Education
While in high school in Austin, Maraniss was sports editor for the school paper, the Austin High Maroon. He got a job writing sports articles as an intern for the Austin American–Statesman. A poster at school about a college scholarship caught his attention and prompted him to submit his news clippings to apply for it. His writing won him a Fred Russell-Grantland Rice Sportswriting Scholarship to Vanderbilt University in 1988. Sportswriting Hall-of-Famer Fred Russell, for whom the sportswriting scholarship is named, took the four recipients out to lunch a couple of times a year and developed personal relationships with them. The tradition continued until Russell's death in 2003. Maraniss worked his way up to sports editor of the Hustler, the college newspaper. After graduation, he had a job as Vanderbilt basketball sports information director.