Author Jack El-Hai ’79 turns little-known history into gripping nonfiction books that have recently been adapted into a podcast, a play, and a major upcoming film
Jack El-Hai ’79 was not expecting much when he arrived at the home of Doug Kelley, in northern California, in 2007. He had been following the paper trail of Kelley’s father, Douglas, a psychiatrist who became notorious for examining Nazi leaders and declaring them sane. The trail was cold. Douglas had been dead and largely forgotten since New Year’s Day 1958, when he stood on the landing of his home’s elegant staircase, made an aggrieved speech to his family, and swallowed a capsule of cyanide.
Then Kelley invited El-Hai into his basement. There, largely unseen since the Truman era, were 15 boxes of papers and mementoes. X-rays of Adolf Hitler’s skull. A photograph of Hermann Göring autographed to Douglas. Bits of food that Rudolf Hess believed were poisoned by the Allies. “I felt excitement but also a wave of nausea,” El-Hai recalls, “like, look at all the work I have ahead of me.”
He would return many times as he wrote The Nazi and the Psychiatrist, which won the Minnesota Book Award for nonfiction in 2014, recounting the unusual relationship between Douglas Kelley and Göring in the lead-up to the Nazi trials in Nuremberg, Germany. Now, the story has been adapted for both the stage and screen. Sense of Decency, a play focused on Kelley’s troubled final years, premiered in April. Nuremberg, set during the trials, was shot this past spring with Rami Malek as Kelley and Russell Crowe as Göring.
At 65, El-Hai is suddenly everywhere. His 2017 story for GQ about a Twin Cities swinger’s club is now a podcast (Time Capsule: The Silver Chain). His 2005 book, The Lobotomist, has been turned into a screenplay, awaiting production. His latest book, Face in the Mirror, about a life-changing face transplant at the Mayo Clinic, comes out this winter. And he’s still adding to his database of story ideas. At last count, there were more than 2,000.
“I’m thrilled for him,” says Cathy Madison, a fellow writer who’s known El-Hai for decades. “It’s a big risk to write books about ideas you’re passionate about. It’s a lot of work and there’s no money in it. But he’s done it and it’s really paid off. You never know what the life of a book is going to be.”
When El-Hai was growing up in Los Angeles, his mother altered his birth certificate so he could enter kindergarten early. “She was anxious to get me out of the house,” he says.
Eventually, he skipped another year, so that he entered Carleton in 1975 at age 16. “I was up for it academically,” he says, “but socially it was hard.” He looked young, felt young. In time, though, he caught up. He’d always been a fast learner.
The idea of a small, liberal arts college far from home had been intriguing. (His cousin Robert Elhai ’81, now a composer in Minneapolis, arrived two years later, followed by his niece Leaf Elhai ’13.) One year, he took a screenwriting course—learning about story structure, why a scene works or doesn’t—and ended up taking two more, all taught by a visiting professor who went on to head the film schools at Columbia and USC. By the end, he was one of just three students in the class, an opportunity too good to pass up.
“At Carleton, I felt like I got the attention I needed,” he says. “If I’d gone to a larger school, I wonder if I’d have gotten lost in the crowd.”
He was an English lit major, not intending to be a writer, even if he did come up with the moniker for the new campus snack bar: Conspicuous Consumption. (An homage to Thorstein Veblen, the social critic and Carleton alum who came up with the term, the name lasted less than two years, apparently because it was too onerous to write on checks.) Though El-Hai’s first job out of college was at the Minneapolis Star Tribune, he wasn’t in the newsroom—he was a tour guide.
He wrote fiction at first, short stories. “I was getting published but there was no money in it,” he says. “At all.” It was during a series of nonprofit gigs—at the Minnesota Museum of American Art, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the Minnesota Orchestra—that he began writing for magazines: Mpls-St.Paul, Minnesota Monthly, Twin Cities. One month, he had stories in all three. He enjoyed it, especially when they were his ideas, and he had plenty of those.
So in 1993, having saved a year’s worth of income, he went all in.
El-Hai rented an office in downtown Minneapolis, like a kind of literary private eye. You looking for stories? I’ll find ’em. Writing, to him, was a job like any other—and still is. He’s a 9 to 5, Monday to Friday writer, barring some existential deadline. “It gives me breathing space,” he says.
For a couple of years, in the early 2000s, he served as president of the American Society of Journalists and Authors, advocating for fair pay and author’s rights. For decades now, he’s been meeting monthly with a cadre of fellow freelancers—to talk business, not stories. They call themselves the Fatter Wallets Forum.
“Writing is a business and no one teaches you how to do it,” says Emily Sohn, a science author and forum participant. “All we really have is each other.” Sohn recently sought El-Hai’s advice on her first book proposal, which ended up selling. “Jack is both super-pragmatic and super-generous with others. He’s got it figured out.”
Of course, it’s not the business of writing he enjoys most, or even the writing. “It’s the story ideation, followed closely by the research,” he says. “The writing isn’t so bad either.” He seems to see stories everywhere. About 25 years ago, he was reading a letter to the editor in the Star Tribune when he noted a brief reference to a lobotomy at Anoka State Hospital. A few weeks later, he called up the writer.
It was a sad story, she told him: her uncle had suffered from epilepsy and chafed at being institutionalized for it. He was given a lobotomy more or less to pacify him. El-Hai went on to discover just how prevalent lobotomies had been in the 1940s and ’50s, especially in Minnesota. And he stumbled on Walter Freeman, a flamboyant physician who inexplicably promoted the practice—and himself—long after the brain-altering surgery was shunned.
“I like characters who pull me in with a lot of questions,” says El-Hai. “If you make a determined dive into their lives—even if you don’t or can’t answer those questions—you can take the reader along on an interesting road.”
The Lobotomist, which earned him his first Minnesota Book Award in 2006 and became an episode of American Experience on PBS, launched El-Hai into the literary world. It also offered the seeds of another story: enigmatic references in Freeman’s notes to a psychiatrist in San Francisco who does magic tricks and to a doctor who examined the Nuremberg criminals and killed himself. Both Douglas Kelley.
Kelley’s experience in Nuremberg, when he concluded that these men were not insane, shook up his whole world.
El-Hai would spend years uncovering what happened. “Kelley’s experience in Nuremberg, when he concluded that these men were not insane, shook up his whole world,” he says. Jake Broder, the playwright who adapted The Nazi and the Psychiatrist for the stage, calls El-Hai “unbelievably thorough” in his research, illuminating human behavior but allowing readers to draw their own conclusions. “It’s something a writer can only do after understanding a topic deeply,” Broder says. “He allows you to empathize with the characters and the bind they’re in.”
Most people, in the wake of World War II, didn’t want to hear Kelley’s conclusion or reckon with its implication: that if there is no Nazi disease, there also is no cure. “The monster is inside the house,” Broder says, “and there but for the grace of God go we.” Kelley became disillusioned. He committed suicide the same way Göring did.
Broder finds contemporary resonance in the story, as new authoritarian leaders find followings. “The playbook that was written by the Third Reich, in terms of political manipulation, was absolutely codified, and bits of it seem to keep popping up,” he says. “We ignore the symmetry at our peril.”
This uncanny ability of El-Hai to make history hum with our present preoccupations draws the past closer, says Madison, and makes his stories so compelling. “He’s able to find something that no one knows about, but also manages to connect it to something we do know about,” she says. “There’s a lot of art in that.”
“It’s been pointed out to me that I like dark stories,” El-Hai says, though there’s little evidence in the light-filled writing studio of his Minneapolis home. Only mandolins and mementos. And books, of course. His Little Free Library, out by the curb, is known in the neighborhood for its thoughtful curation (at last check, a mix of historical thrillers and detective novels—dark but smart).
About every two years, he goes through the things he’s written lately, to reflect on what he enjoyed about them—and do more of it. At some point, medical histories rose to the top. “I don’t think I’m a dark person normally, but I like going where these stories take me,” he says. “Maybe because the stakes are high.” Healthcare, he notes, is literally a matter of life and death.
Philip Turner, an editor and agent in New York, recruited El-Hai to write the upcoming book about a face transplant at the Mayo Clinic after reading The Lobotomist years ago. “I was impressed by how sensitively he wrote about medical professionals and the people who encounter them for care,” he says, “and doing so with scientific clarity.” He’s not surprised so many of El-Hai’s stories have been adapted, their human dramas playing out in “moral quandaries and life choices.”
El-Hai has come up with a formula for rating and ranking his myriad story ideas according to certain personal criteria, including “the potential of a story to have an afterlife, after I’m done with it,” he says. Unlike some authors, he isn’t wary of others’ interpretations.
“When someone comes and says we’d like to adapt this story, I’m so happy, because I’ve had my chance with it and now here’s someone else who wants their chance.”
Lately, he’s been researching the story of an Apache medicine man, imprisoned for murdering his wife, who wrote to Erle Stanley Gardner, the best-selling author of the Perry Mason mysteries. Gardner ran a kind of proto–Innocence Project called the Court of Last Resort, and El-Hai found the case within its files. So far, it checks all of his boxes—including boxes. (“I love old boxes full of papers with rusted paper clips and brittle papers and staples that can’t come out anymore,” he says.) An afterlife seems a safe bet.
Like all afterlives, though, what becomes of books is largely a matter of faith. Nearly ten years passed between the publishing of The Nazi and the Psychiatrist and the making of the movie. The stage production happened because Broder raved about the book to the artistic director of the North Coast Repertory Theatre, near San Diego, who happened to be an old friend of El-Hai from junior high school.
This past spring, El-Hai was part of a panel discussion at a writers conference, about how books become movies. (Kai Bird ’73, who co-wrote the biography that became Oppenheimer, was also on the panel.) He tried to think of some tips. Write about intriguing characters doing important, dramatic things. Write in scenes. Build your story around conflict.
His own experience, though, suggests that much depends on others, which has its own pleasures. “It’s not often that the author does something to make it happen—other than to write the book,” he says. “It’s like winning the lottery.”