One Thursday earlier this month, David Grann schlepped into Manhattan from Westchester, and I from New Jersey, to catch up before the October 20 theatrical release of Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, based on Grann’s acclaimed 2017 book of the same name. That evening, Grann was scheduled to moderate a conversation with Lawrence Wright, his Austin-based New Yorker colleague and the author of a new novel called Mr. Texas. Their event was at the Rizzoli Bookstore on 26th and Broadway, so we met in Madison Square Park beforehand and grabbed a table near Shake Shack. Grann declined my offer of french fries and cracked open a grapefruit Spindrift, elbow-bumping in lieu of a handshake because he felt like he was coming down with a cold.

For a writer who plies his trade on the Mount Olympus of literary nonfiction, Grann is one of the most approachable people you’ll ever meet. (Disclosures all around as I sing his praises: I’m a fan, we’re friendly, and my wife also works at The New Yorker, which shares a parent company with Vanity Fair.) So you can’t begrudge the guy for hogging the New York Times best-seller list practically all year long.

Week after week, not just one but two of Grann’s books have made the list, and usually pretty high up—Killers because it’s been getting a second wind thanks to the Scorsese factor; and The Wager, an 18th-century shipwreck thriller, because it came out in April and, well, at this point, when a David Grann book comes out, it’s going to be a bestseller that’s picked up for an ambitious Hollywood production. (Scorsese is adapting The Wager too.) “I spent most of my reporting life struggling to make a living, really the majority of it,” Grann said. “In the last few years, because the films and the books have done better, I don’t have that struggle anymore. It’s a luxury.”

Killers of the Flower Moon, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro, cinematically restructures the narrative of the book, which exposed the systematic killings of dozens of members of the Osage tribe who had become wealthy from the oil discovered beneath their land. I’d recently learned about a controversy related to the teaching of the book, which is what prompted me to get in touch with Grann.

There’s a measure in Oklahoma called HB 1775. The broad language in the law, adopted in 2021 and similar to other CRT-type bills around the country, decrees that it is illegal in Oklahoma—the site of the 1920s Osage Indian murders chronicled in Killers—to “make part of any Course offered in a public school…discriminatory principles” such as, for instance, the notion that “an individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously”; or the idea that “any individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race or sex.”

HB 1775, now facing fresh scrutiny thanks to the arrival of the movie, has raised concerns among Oklahoma educators about whether they might run afoul of the law for assigning Grann’s book. In at least one Oklahoma high school, copies of Killers were purchased for an 11th-grade English class, only to sit unread after HB 1775 became law. An English teacher at the school, Debra Thoreson, felt it would be a professional risk to introduce discussions about race that are central to the story. “As soon as that passed,” she told The Oklahoman, “I realized I would be setting myself up for House Bill 1775 to take away my license.”

That’s what I wanted to talk with Grann about—Killers of the Flower Moon being swept up in America’s culture wars. “The idea that you can’t have free discussions that deal with history,” he said, “and create conversations that can sometimes cause discomfort in the sense that you’re dealing with hard truths—I mean, I don’t think you can be in our profession if you don’t believe in truth, history, and knowledge.”

Grann first heard about HB 1775 from some of his Osage Nation friends, whom he has remained in touch with ever since working on Killers. (He visits Oklahoma every year.) The news understandably disturbed him, and not just because of his proximity to it. “The point is not about my book,” he said. “The point is about history. These conversations are about Native American history, about the past experience of tribal nations in Oklahoma.”

Does Grann have a role to play in bringing attention to the law, which the Osage Nation Congress and an intertribal Native American council have formally opposed?

“I’ve had conversations with different members of the Osage Nation, and I’m trying to work on something now with a member of the Osage Nation that will hopefully explore and examine some of these issues,” he told me. “Let me just put it this way: I’m here to help in any way I can, but the Osage Nation already put out a really profound statement—they adopted a resolution calling for the repeal of the law. And so if I have a role, it’s to express my support for that.”

Here’s a little-known fact about Grann: He himself was once a teacher—seventh- and eighth-grade history (and Spanish) at the Gordon School in East Providence, Rhode Island, his first job out of Connecticut College following a research fellowship in Mexico. “A teacher now, teaching the civil rights movement to seventh graders, it could be a hornet’s nest,” he said. “The real danger is that, even when laws don’t explicitly say ‘we’re banning this book’ or ‘we are banning this subject,’ they are leaving teachers and administrators always worried about losing their certification and their accreditation. So it creates this soft censorship.”

As a narrative historian, Grann has strong feelings about book bans and other forms of academic bowdlerization. “History is filled with the good and the bad because it is a tapestry of human nature, and human beings, and societies. It’s filled with conflict, it’s filled with heroism, it’s filled with trial, it’s filled with tragedy, it’s filled with utter villainy, it’s filled with prejudice, it’s filled with contempt. It has it all. I think we have an obligation not only to factually record our past, but also—it’s the way we learn about the kind of nation we want to be in the future…. You could try to suppress history, but the forces of that history remain. It’s still shaping you. It can still fester. You can’t obliterate history. The question is, how do you harness history?”

Grann taught history for a year—“hardest job I ever had”—before enrolling first at Tufts for a master’s in international relations, and then at Boston University for a master’s in creative writing. He stumbled into a journalism career with a copyediting gig in 1994 at The Hill, where he quickly rose to executive editor. He then landed a job with The New Republic and wrote features about Newt Gingrich, John McCain, and the like. But political reporting was never his true love.

In 2003, a feature about an inveterate bank robber got Grann’s foot in the door at The New Yorker, where he has held the magazine’s coveted “staff writer” title ever since. His oeuvre ranges from a giant squid to a lost Amazonian civilization to the mysterious death of a Sherlock Holmes fanatic.

“I love being transported to worlds I don’t know, places I don’t know,” Grann said. “As long as I’m curious about something, then I’m compelled to want to learn about it.” Over the course of his two decades at The New Yorker, his byline has appeared a discerning 30 times, on features, book excerpts, and a smattering of web posts. “I’m mono-obsessed. I tend to just so hyperfocus on one thing that my brain doesn’t really allow in space for other things.”

Seven of Grann’s books and articles—including his New Yorker debut, which became David Lowery’s 2018 film, The Old Man & the Gun, starring Robert Redford—have been, or are being, adapted for the screen. (In addition to the upcoming Wager adaptation, Grann’s 2018 banger, The White Darkness, about the late Antarctic explorer Henry Worsley, is in development as a limited series for Apple TV+.)

Killers of the Flower Moon is Grann’s most blockbuster adaptation to date. The movie was filmed in Oklahoma and features Osage and other Indigenous actors. The Osage, as it's been relayed to Grann, "were involved in every level of production, everything from the sets to the costumes to the Osage language. They’ve been on this quest to revive the language, and it’s spoken in the film. I’ve been told that De Niro really got it down.”

For decades, the Osage murders had been consigned to the dustier corners of American history. Grann’s number one New York Times bestseller shined a bright light on the story, plucking it from obscurity. Now Scorsese’s film will bring it to a far wider audience. I asked Grann if books can only take a story so far—if it takes Hollywood to really insert something into the culture.

“As a book writer,” he said, “I’d like to think that books can have power. Books have transformed me over my lifetime, and influenced me, and shaped me and the way I think. So I am an enormous believer in the power of literature and history and fiction to really shape us and deepen the way we think. But I’m also not naive, and I do realize that films—especially a film made by people of this caliber, skill, and talent—will reach many, many more people. My hope is that [this] begins conversations, that you’ll learn about Osage culture, and that you’ll learn more about this history…. I don’t believe in definitive accounts. Knowledge grows through conversations.”

At 56, with a 19-year-old, a 16-year-old, and a wife, Kyra Darnton, who is an award-winning broadcast journalist (she had an illustrious run at 60 Minutes before becoming president and executive producer of Retro Report), Grann belongs to an elite and increasingly rare breed of old-school print journalists, breaking out in magazines at a time when magazines were still in their heyday. He’s in a position to concentrate on one or two exhaustively reported features a year, or a book every few years, and reap the rewards as the entertainment industry breathes new life into his stories. He can spend a generous amount of time researching, reporting, and traveling for a story, for the express purpose of determining whether it’s a story that warrants devoting months or years of his life to.

Before I turned the recorder off so we could really shoot the shit, I asked Grann if he thought a career like his was attainable anymore.

“I don’t know the answer to that question,” he said. “One can’t be a part of this industry and not worry about the financial stability of it, and the ability of people to sustain an income for really good work. With reporting and research, you have to travel sometimes, or you have to go through archives, or you have to hunt people down who don’t want to be found or are off the grid. And that takes time and a certain financial investment. Thankfully, there are a number of publications who still do this really well. I certainly hope and pray it continues.”