The Long and Long of It

Thomas E. Patterson had read T. Harry Williams’ Pulitzer Prize-winning 1969 Huey Long biography, and he’d watched the Ken Burns documentary on the former Louisiana governor. But it was the 2008 financial crisis that sparked Patterson’s own interest in writing about Long. 

“Wealth inequality was Huey’s central concern throughout his life,” says Patterson, a business litigator at The Patterson Law Firm in Chicago. “If you’re looking at a biography, you need an interesting person and interesting times. And here I had a fascinating person in weird times.”

Patterson had written a book on injunctions for the ABA in 2009, and he figured it would take three years to write what would become American Populist, ultimately published by LSU Press in 2025. “That’s like a lawyer estimating their fees in advance,” he laughs. 

Though he’d never written a biography before, Patterson had a leg up: No biographer had previously tapped into Long’s personal papers, which were donated to LSU after Williams’ biography was released. “That really gave me an insight into his early life,” Patterson says. “And then, with the internet, I could research better than people in the old days could.”

Patterson laments writing the manuscript before attending a writer’s conference or having written any articles on Long for scholarly journals. But he says the scholars have been enthusiastic, and he enjoyed seeing the 700-page tome come together. “In a way, it’s very similar to practicing law: A client comes into your office with a box of documents—or 10 boxes, or 100. They tell you a story, and you’ve got to make sense of it,” he says. “Putting together the story of his life was very similar to putting together a very large court case.”