The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir was published by Broadway Books in October 2006 and is Bryson’s autobiography — or rather, his memoir of growing up in Des Moines, Iowa, in the 1950s, when the city had department stores with pneumatic-tube systems, when children roamed unsupervised for entire days, when nuclear tests were visible from the backyard, and when the young Bryson believed himself to be the Thunderbolt Kid, a superhero capable of vaporizing annoying adults with a beam from his eyes.
The memoir is both personal (Bryson’s family, his school experiences, his first jobs) and cultural (the rise of television, the nuclear anxiety, the consumer prosperity, the racial segregation that Bryson, as a white child in a white city, barely noticed until much later). The combination of comic reminiscence and social history produces Bryson’s most personal and, at times, most moving book.
The Lost America
Bryson’s Des Moines is a vanished world: a city of locally owned stores, neighborhood cinemas, afternoon newspapers, and children who walked everywhere unaccompanied. The memoir’s undercurrent of loss — for a kind of American life that no longer exists — gives the comedy its emotional weight. Bryson knows he is describing a world his grandchildren will find as alien as the eighteenth century.
Collecting The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid
First edition (Broadway Books, New York, 2006): Boards with dust jacket.
Approximate market values:
- Fine in dust jacket: $40–$100
- Very good: $15–$40
Projected values (2026–2036): Moderate appreciation. The memoir is Bryson’s most personal book and has an enduring readership.