Nick Offerman’s latest book celebrates his red, white and blue inspirations

Nick Offerman made red-blooded, mustachioed government employee Ron Swanson an American TV icon on NBC’s Parks and Recreation. With his second book, Gumption, Offerman aims to do the same with 21 real Americans, lionizing the likes of George Washington, Yoko Ono and Carol Burnett. It’s not a history book but it’s educational, insightful and funny, told in Offerman’s uniquely American voice.

The Pitch discussed the book with Offerman by phone as he sat inside his car outside his Los Angeles wood shop ahead of Thursday’s appearance at Unity Temple on the Plaza.

The Pitch: How did you go about selecting the 21 people that made it into this book?

Offerman: When we first cooked it up — my editor and I — we sat down, and I rattled off, like, a hundred names. It’s an intimidating list for anyone to come up with, naming the people who you love and who inspire you. So then we began to whittle it down. We sort of picked out highlights. And she did a good job of putting limits. She would be like, “OK, let’s say you can have four people from the founding period.”

She actually whittled me down to 16, and I brutally fought her — sometimes with my actual fists — back up to 21 people. And I could easily start Volume 2 right now on the next 21. In order to make a packageable book and get it done in time, we had to set the limits that we did, and I made it out by the hair on my chin.

The book starts with our nation’s founder and ends with Conan O’Brien. You interview the living, but how did you get to know the others?

I had a research assistant who helped me collate material. With some of the figures that were historical, I would say to my research assistant: “OK, in these five biographies, find me any hunting chapters for Roosevelt or any foreign-relations chapters for Eleanor.” But it was a trap because I’d read those chapters and then I’d be like, “Well, now I have to go back and read this childhood chapter.”

So I ended up doing a great deal of reading, and then I’d have conversations with my editor, and she would record the conversations, and they would transcribe them. So I ended up with, like, four binders, 4-inches-thick each, as the research vault of what went into the book.

It seems that all of that information could get overwhelming, especially with the historical figures. It would have been easy to just regurgitate information that you’d read. But that’s not how it felt reading it.

I kept reminding myself that nobody was going to be looking to me to present a scholarly biographical portrait of any of these people. Instead, it was, What is it about these people that I think can be inspirational to my readership, or maybe what is it about these people’s lives that aren’t the highlights of the great biographies?

Every single one of the 21 chapters, I wish I could have written a hundred pages instead of 20. I felt that the most poignantly with Wendell Berry because I’m just so passionate about his work — like, “Argh! God, please don’t make me cut this!” But I understood very well that even with the cutting, we still yielded a 400-page book. So part of the idea of the book is to encourage people to then go find out about Wendell Berry’s writing for themselves, to go listen to all of Jeff Tweedy’s music, to go back and look at the incredible trajectory of Conan’s career and the tomfoolery and intelligent giggles that he’s brought to us.

The Carol Burnett chapter also kind of rocked my world with that bit about the Equal Rights Amendment of 1923, which never passed. I felt kind of sick for a second.

That’s also part of the impetus for the book, is that so much of our country has grown so comfortable with all of our luxuries that we’ve forgotten about the work that still needs to be done. When I looked it up, I felt the same nausea. Like, what? This thing is a hundred years old!

And my first inkling came, as you may have read, in that Laurie Anderson song [“Little Red Dress”] where she says, in 1989, that for every dollar a man makes, a woman makes 63 cents. And it was just insane. Why are we not burning down buildings? That’s absolutely untenable. And so part of the impetus for the book was just to remind us all that, hey, there’s still some fixing to do, everybody. Like, I know you’re all having fun on Facebook, but maybe we pay attention for a little longer.

Gumption is your second book, and it’s very different from the first. How did you figure out the path to being the writer that you are, and what do we get to read from you next?

I wish I had a concise answer for you, but I’m a very lucky person. I follow my gut, and it’s kept me out of the world of vanity and the sort of chasing of popular culture. I always knew if my work was going to be legitimate, it wasn’t going to come from trying to be cute or trying to make the most money or get the highest ratings. Instead, my role was to hang back by the woodshed and report on my observations from that vantage. And I still am just tickled pink and just kind of astonished that anyone gives a shit to read something that I would write. It tickles me pink. [Giggles.] I’m thrilled to pieces.

As far as what will come next, actually, probably first up is gonna be a coffee-table book about the wood shop and sort of a combination woodworking book for everybody — including some prose pieces and some candy-gorgeous photography. Beyond that, I don’t know. If this book does well, I wouldn’t mind thinking about doing another go-round. And also, eventually, when I feel ready to build my first guitar, I think I’m going to document that whole process and write a book about that.

But I don’t know. I’m a lucky kid. I’m getting nice acting jobs. Among my other good fortunes is included the one in which I don’t have to sit around and wonder, “Oh, no, what am I gonna do next?”