David McCullough

He came to history sideways, and late. McCullough grew up in the Point Breeze neighborhood of Pittsburgh and studied English at Yale, where he ate lunch with Thornton Wilder, who told him a writer keeps an air of freedom in a story so the reader cannot see the end coming. Then magazine work — Time Inc. in New York, the United States Information Agency in Washington, then American Heritage. He was an editor, not an academic, with no history degree and no doctorate, then or ever. At the Library of Congress he found photographs of the 1889 Johnstown flood, looked for a book about it and found none. He bought a secondhand typewriter in 1965, wrote it himself, and used that machine for every book of his life.

The Great Bridge came in 1972, The Path Between the Seas in 1977, Mornings on Horseback in 1981. Then the two Pulitzers, for Truman in 1993 and John Adams in 2002, and a readership no university historian could touch. The subjects have their own entries on this site — Truman, John Adams, Theodore Roosevelt, the Roeblings who built the Brooklyn Bridge, George Washington Goethals who finished the Panama Canal. McCullough is the writer through whom a great many Americans met every one of them.

Academic historians have never quite agreed that this was history. The complaint, made steadily for decades, is that the books are celebratory — that they run on character and leave out structure, that they admire their subjects, and that heroic biography is not an account of the past. 1776 and The Pioneers drew the sharpest versions. On The Pioneers, published in 2019 and subtitled The Heroic Story of the Settlers Who Brought the American Ideal West, historians objected that the settlement of Ohio was told as a triumph with almost no weight given to Native dispossession. Joyce Chaplin wrote that he played down the violence that displaced the Indians and adopted the settlers' own language of savages and wilderness. Indigenous critics said so publicly. His answer, in general, was that narrative and character are how most people are reached.

Most Americans knew the voice before they knew the books. It carried nine episodes of The Civil War in 1990, hosted American Experience on PBS for 12 years, and narrated Seabiscuit in 2003 — unhurried, plain, the sound of the past explained by a man who had read the letters. George W. Bush hung the Presidential Medal of Freedom on him at the White House on December 15, 2006. Rosalee, whom he had known since they were teenagers and married in 1954, died that June. He died at home in Hingham, Massachusetts, on August 7, 2022, at 89. Pittsburgh had already named a bridge for him.

David McCullough's life against the full span of the corpus.

• The Johnstown Flood book
  Begun after he found photographs of the 1889 disaster at the Library of Congress 1968
• The Great Bridge book
  The Roeblings and the building of the Brooklyn Bridge 1972
• The Path Between the Seas book
  The Panama Canal — National Book Award in History 1977
• Mornings on Horseback book
  Seventeen years of the young Theodore Roosevelt — a second National Book Award 1981
• Truman book
  Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 1993 1992
• John Adams book
  Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 2002 — later an HBO miniseries 2001

• July 7, 1933 aged 0 Born in the Point Breeze neighborhood of Pittsburgh One of four sons of Christian and Ruth McCullough.
• 1955 aged ~22 Graduates from Yale with honors in English literature He had gone there to become a novelist or a playwright.
• 1965 aged ~32 Buys a secondhand typewriter and starts writing at night He was still on staff at American Heritage. Every book he published was typed on that machine.
• 1968 aged ~35 Publishes The Johnstown Flood and quits the magazine business
• 1977 aged ~44 The Path Between the Seas wins the National Book Award That year he advised Jimmy Carter and the Senate on the treaties handing the canal to Panama.
• September 23, 1990 aged 57 Narrates the premiere of The Civil War on PBS Nine episodes, watched by roughly 40 million people.
• 2002 aged ~69 Wins a second Pulitzer Prize, for John Adams The first came in 1993 for Truman.
• December 15, 2006 aged 73 Receives the Presidential Medal of Freedom at the White House
• August 7, 2022 aged 89 Dies at home in Hingham, Massachusetts, at 89 Two months after the death of his wife Rosalee.

• Harry S. Truman 1884–1972
  33rd President who authorized the atomic bomb and implemented the Marshall Plan. biographer of
• John Adams 1735–1826
  Second President and key Founding Father who helped secure independence and shaped early American diplomacy. biographer of
• Theodore Roosevelt 1858–1919
  26th President known for progressive reforms, conservation efforts, and assertive foreign policy. wrote about
• John A. Roebling 1806–1869
  Developed wire-rope suspension bridge design and planned the Brooklyn Bridge. chronicled
• George Washington Goethals 1858–1928
  Chief engineer of the Panama Canal chronicled
• Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. 1917–2007
  Historian of American liberalism and special assistant to John F. Kennedy fellow historian