This interview was originally broadcast on Sept. 26, 2012.
After the global financial crisis hit in 2008, Pulitzer Prize winner J.R. Moehringer was so angry at banks, he says, he decided to write about the people who rob them — in the form of fiction, since he's not an economist.
"I thought it would be healthy to live vicariously through a bank robber at that moment that bankers were ruining the world," Moehringer tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross.
In his first historical novel, Sutton, Moehringer writes from the point of view of Willie Sutton, whom he calls the "greatest American bank robber."
Stealing from scores of banks over three decades without ever firing a shot, Sutton began his career in the late 1920s at a time of soaring unemployment, bank panics and depressions.
He was known as a "Robin Hood figure" and an "anti-societal force," Moehringer says. Growing up, Moehringer says, he remembers people "speaking about him with curious admiration — they always mentioned Sutton with a nod of the head and a wink."
Sutton escaped prison several times, but he was finally put away after he was arrested in 1952. Because he was ill, New York authorities released him in 1969. He died in 1980 at age 79.
To research the famous criminal's life, Moehringer pored over old FBI records, police files, newspapers and Sutton's memoirs — all of which contradict each other in ways, according to Moehringer. While the truth and reality are important to him as a journalist, Moehringer says, he also likes historical fiction "because there's so much about history we don't know — and novelists can get us close to it with their imagination."
Moehringer reported for the Los Angeles Times for many years and has also written two memoirs — Open and The Tender Bar. Open is about Andre Agassi's life — Moehringer was the ghost writer. The Tender Bar is about how Moehringer was raised by a single mother and an uncle who was a barfly — and how he became a writer.
Moehringer says he's glad to have lost the pretensions of his youth. As a teenager, he says, he was determined to use these words in his college essay: "Strident, bucolic, fulcrum, inimical, behemoth, Jesuitical, minion, eclectic, Marquis de Sod — spelled 'sod' — and aesthetic.
"And you can imagine the essay that resulted from these words."
Interview Highlights
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J.R. Moehringer is the best-selling author of The Tender Bar. In 2000, he won the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing for his work at the Los Angeles Times.