Daniel James Brown's 'The Boys in the Boat' Now a Major Motion Picture

Back in 2015, narrative nonfiction writer, Daniel James Brown, joined Writer’s Voices to discuss his third published book and New York Times #1 bestseller, Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Now a major motion picture, Boys in the Boat tells the captivating true story of nine working-class boys, all members of the University of Washington crew team, who competed and brought home Gold at the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, Germany. With no prior knowledge of this event, Brown came across this information through his neighbor, whose father wanted to meet him to discuss an earlier book that he had written. The man’s name was Joe Rantz and he was living in hospice care in the neighbor’s home. During the conversation, Joe talked about various things, including his childhood during the Great Depression, “…but then he began to talk about how he and a bunch of boys had come together at the University of Washington starting in the fall of 1933, and become, arguably, the greatest collegiate crew of all time, and wound up rowing for an Olympic Gold medal in Berlin in 1936 against a German boat in front of Adolf Hitler, and as Joe was telling me this story, I just became absolutely mesmerized by it, and so the book really all flowed out of that first conversation with Joe.”

While their triumph over the Germans was momentous, the event was largely overshadowed by an even bigger story, one of Jesse Owens and his own incredible success at the Olympic Games. “…the Jesse Owens story was so prominent that summer that it kind of dominated the headlines and this story got a little bit buried because of that… Jesse Owens, the African American track and field star from Ohio, had gone to Berlin and very impressively, he won four straight Gold medals, and because he was African American and this was in front of Hitler, it was an enormous embarrassment to Hitler and his whole white supremacy theory of the world, and it was a sensational story both because of Jesse’s extraordinary accomplishment and also because of the racial implications for the Nazis…” Despite that, the crew team’s victory did make national news at the time, but because there wasn’t a lot of celebration surrounding their win, the story faded from memory over time.

Due to numerous requests from educators, librarians, parents and grandparents who felt that this book would be beneficial to younger audiences, Brown created a separate young readers adaptation of this story. Compared to the adult version, the adaptation is shorter and divided into more chapters, with simplified, age-appropriate language. Additionally, visual elements were incorporated, including a timeline to help young readers keep track of the events, a photo gallery of all the main characters in the book, a diagram of a rowing shell, and more. Brown remarked, “It was very important to me that the heart of the story, through the emotional impact, particularly of General Rantz’s story, the heart of it remained intact, so I worked to make sure that that happened…”