Larry Colton

Featured on October 17, 1997 AND February 17, 2001

Larry Colton’s resume begins in 1965 when he was a professional baseball player, playing for the Philadelphia Phillies. His Major League Debut was on May 6, 1968 and he played one season. His next job was teaching English and journalism for the Portland Public School District.

Larry’s first book was Idol Time, published in 1977. The book is a profile of the Trail Blazers’ championship season. From 1984 to 1986 Larry worked as a corporate writer for Nike, then became a fulltime freelancer, and has since written over 250 feature stories for magazines such as Esquire, Sports Illustrated, Boston Globe, Philadelphia Inquirer, Ladies Home Journal, and The New York Times Magazine.

In 1993, his second book, Goat Brothers, was published by Doubleday. The book became a main selection of the Book of the Month Club and was optioned for a movie. The story chronicles the lives of himself and four fraternity brothers from their days at the University of California at Berkeley in the 1960s to their present middle age.

His third book, Counting Coup: A True Story of Basketball And Honor On The Little Big Horn, was published in September 2000 and immediately became the International eBook Foundation non-fiction book of the year. It is also in the running for a Pulitzer Prize.

In Native American tradition, a warrior gained honor and glory by "counting coup" – touching his enemy in battle and living to tell the tale. Larry spent fifteen months living among Montana’s Crow Indians to follow the struggles of a talented, moody, charismatic young woman named Sharon LaForge, a gifted basketball player and a descendant of one of George Armstrong Custer’s Indian scouts.

Larry lives in Portland and still has a day job. He works as Project Director of the Community of Writers, a non-profit organization in Portland dedicated to improving the quality of writing instruction in Oregon’s public schools.

www.communityofwriters.com