To Pennsylvanians, Jim Thorpe, Carbon County, is a borough in the northeast part of the state.

But for the rest of the United States, the name Jim Thorpe is that of a great athlete, perhaps the best who ever lived. The borough, of course, was named after him.

Thorpe’s life is told in a new biography by David Maraniss, “Path Lit by Lightning: The Life of Jim Thorpe” (554 pages; $18.49, hardcover, $21.99, paperback; $16.99, digital, Simon & Schuster, 2022).

Path Lit by Lightning is the translation of Thorpe’s Native-American name. His heritage was as important to his life as his athletic accomplishments.

Maraniss has also written “Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball’s Last Hero” and “When Pride Still Mattered: A Life of Vince Lombardi.”

“In my books, I am looking for more than just sports history and sociology. From the beginning, I wanted to include the Native-American experience,” Maraniss says in a phone interview.

“I consider this [‘Path Lit by Lightning’] to be the third book in a trilogy, about people who transformed sports.”

Thorpe, who lived from 1887 to 1953, rose to fame as a member of the football team of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, Carlisle, Cumberland County, about 25 miles southwest of Harrisburg.

“The Carlisle football team was a powerhouse,” says Maraniss.

The Carlisle Indians usually defeated Ivy League schools and others they competed against, including Lehigh University and Lafayette College.

Maraniss says football was the spectator sport in which Thorpe was most accomplished. At the time Thorpe left school, pro football consisted of “ragtag” teams and it was not nearly as popular as many other sports.

However, Maraniss says, “He [Thorpe] was the first real star of professional football, one of the first to be inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame.”

Thorpe was also good enough to play pro baseball for teams in the National League.

And Thorpe was a track star. He won the pentathlon and decathlon at the Stockholm 1912 Olympic Games.

Standing out in all three fields was something Maraniss says no one else has done before or since.

Thorpe also played professional basketball.

His Olympic medals were taken away by the International Olympic Committee after a newspaper story revealed that Thorpe earned a small amount of money playing baseball, which disqualified him as an amateur.

This was commonly done by college football players during their off-season. Unlike Thorpe, they usually used aliases. One example was future president Dwight Eisenhower.

Thorpe’s medals were finally restored in 2022, 110 years after they were first awarded.

Readers may be surprised at how badly Native-Americans were treated during Thorpe’s lifetime.

“He was not even a [United States] citizen when he won his Olympic gold medals. There has been a duality of feelings in this country about Native-Americans. They have been both romanticized and mistreated throughout history.

“It goes back to Black Hawk.” Black Hawk and Thorpe were members of the Sauk and Fox clan. “When Black Hawk was captured in 1832, white people turned out in droves to see this exotic Native-American.

“People have been eager to claim some Native-American in their blood. It is different from the treatment of African-Americans in white society.”

Native-Americans were pressured into renouncing their heritage.

Col. Richard Henry Pratt, founder of the Carlisle School, was known for saying, “All the Indian that is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him and save the man.”

Says Maraniss of Thorpe, “He went through so many struggles.” Maraniss recounts many of them in the book.

Despite his sports triumphs, Thorpe could never hang on to his money and moved from job to job, at one point digging ditches in Los Angeles to support his family. His first child died at an early age from influenza. He was married three times and had problems with alcohol.

In the May 1953 primary, residents voted to merge the then impoverished towns of Mauch Chunk and East Mauch Chunk and rename them Jim Thorpe. Thorpe’s widow allowed him to be buried there, even though he had no ties to the region.

She had hoped that a Jim Thorpe college, hospital, and even the Pro Football Hall of Fame might follow, which never came to pass.

Later efforts by Native-Americans to bring back his remains to his native Oklahoma were unsuccessful. In 2015, the U.S. Supreme Court ended a five-year legal case when it denied an appeal by Thorpe family members.

Maraniss has a positive view of Thorpe’s life, feeling that it represents triumph over adversity.

Thorpe, except for being stripped of his Olympic medals, never seemed bitter.

Maraniss says that Thorpe sets an example for all of us: “Everyone can relate to Jim Thorpe.”

Maraniss, an associate editor at the Washington Post, has written 13 books, won two Pulitzer Prizes and was a Pulitzer finalist three other times. He and his wife live in Washington, D.C., and Madison, Wisc.

“Literary Scene” is a column about authors, books and publishing. To request coverage, email: Paul Willistein, Focus editor, pwillistein@tnonline.com