Detroit is more than just David Maraniss’ birthplace – it’s the city where his conscience, his cadence, and his many obsessions sprung to life.

The son of a blacklisted newspaperman who learned early that words could be weapons, Maraniss grew up in a politically charged Jewish family during one of Detroit’s most fractious, ideologically charged decades.

His father, Elliott Maraniss, was the managing editor of the Michigan Daily at the University of Michigan – a leftist who, under McCarthy, was made to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee.

After refusing to state that he was a communist, citing his Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination, Elliot was summarily fired from the paper and later blacklisted.

David was just a child at the time, but the lesson stuck: truth costs something.

And so, while other kids read comics and learned how to throw a perfect spiral, David found himself reading the front page of the newspaper and teaching himself how to shape a lede.

His classroom was his household – and journalism his inheritance.

David attended Cranbrook School in Bloomfield Hills during the 1960s, right in the thick of Detroit’s slow spiral into chaos.

It was a time when riots loomed and factories that were backed by union strongholds one day faced mass layoffs the next.

By the time Maraniss left for college at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Detroit was more than a city – it was a tragic case study of slow decay: a place that made things, unmade things, and exposed the soul of a nation in the process.

Maraniss started his career working for the paper in Madison and then Detroit before moving to The Washington Post, where his reporting on national politics, race, and sports would define a generation of long-form journalism.

His coverage of then-presidential candidate Bill Clinton won him the Pulitzer Prize in 1993. Those reports led to “First in His Class,” a detailed biography of Clinton that exposed the failings, virtues, and vanity of a man and his moment.

But Maraniss isn’t a one hit wonder man. 

Nor is he a hagiographer.

Quite the contrary, he’s a patient excavator of contradictions, backstories, and childhoods – a skillset he’s used to tell other iconic stories, such as:

“Barack Obama: The Story”

“When Pride Still Mattered: A Life Of Vince Lombardi”

“Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball’s Last Hero”

Of all of David Maraniss’ books, “Once in a Great City: A Detroit Story” may very well be his most personal: a literary time capsule documenting Detroit in 1963.

It was a year when the metro area was a city of wonders, punctuated by muscle cars and Motown, Martin Luther King’s Dream, union strength, political ambition, and cultural power.

Maraniss wrote about it all so clearly that reading it feels like stepping into a time machine.

And yet, the book is mournful – not merely nostalgic – serving as a fitting elegy for what might have been, even more than what came to be.

It’s a meditation on how cities die slowly, not suddenly.

Maraniss does for Detroit in this book what Joan Didion did for California. 

He shows you the long-lost glamour and you feel the grief.

David Maraniss writes neither to sway nor to seduce.

He writes so that we can all remember clearly.

Now a renowned national figure, David remains a true Detroiter at heart. 

You can hear it in his interviews. 

In how he writes about the past.

In his pauses between facts.

He writes like someone who deeply misses their hometown – physically and spiritually.

Yet he returns to it on page and in memory – and for that, Detroiters will always hold him in high regard.

Victoria Jackson (Editor In Chief)

Victoria Jackson is a lifelong student and sharp-eyed documentarian of all things Detroit, from its rich musical roots and cultural icons to its shifting neighborhoods, storied architecture, and underground legends. With her finger firmly on the pulse of both the city’s vibrant past and its rapidly unfolding future, she brings a deeply personal, historically grounded lens to every piece she writes.

Published on: June 26, 2025