And he wound up going to Japan not as a miler but as a savagely abused prisoner of war. Zamperini became an Air Force lieutenant. But a deeply unfunny thing happened to him on the way to Japan. “The only runner who could beat him was Seabiscuit,” said Louie Zamperini’s coach at the University of Southern California, as this track star, who had competed in the 1936 Berlin Olympics, trained for the 1940 Olympics in Tokyo. But as a teenager, he emerged as one of the greatest runners America had ever seen, competing at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, where he put on a sensational performance, crossed paths with Hitler, and stole a German flag right off the Reich Chancellery. Growing up in California in the 1920s, Louie was a hellraiser, stealing everything edible that he could carry, staging elaborate pranks, getting in fistfights, and bedeviling the local police. After I finished Seabiscuit, I tracked Louie down, called him and asked about his life. I knew only a little about him then, but I couldn't shake him from my mind. As I researched the Depression-era racehorse, I kept coming across stories about Louie, a 1930s track star who endured an amazing odyssey in World War II. It was a horsethe subject of my first book, Seabiscuit: An American Legend-who led me to Louie. His name was Louie Zamperini, and from the day I first spoke to him, his almost incomprehensibly dramatic life was my obsession.

The Story of Unbroken by Laura HillenbrandĮight years ago, an old man told me a story that took my breath away. Interview Laura Hillenbrand explains how she became spellbound by the life of Louie Zamperini, the hero of her new book, Unbroken. She and actor Gary Sinise are the co-founders of Operation International Children (a charity that provides school supplies to children through American troops. In late 2010 her second book, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption, was published to great aclaim. Hillenbrands New Yorker article, 'A Sudden Illness,' won the 2004 National Magazine Award, and she is a two-time winner of the Eclipse Award, the highest journalistic honor in thoroughbred racing.

Laura Hillenbrand is the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Seabiscuit: An American Legend, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, won the Book Sense Nonfiction Book of the Year award and the William Hill Sports Book of the Year award, landed on more than fifteen best-of-the-year lists, and inspired the film Seabiscuit, which was nominated for seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture.

Author of seabiscuit and unbroken