NEW YORK (AP) — David McCullough, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author whose lovingly crafted short stories on subjects ranging from the Brooklyn Bridge to Presidents John Adams and Harry Truman made him one of the most popular and influential historians of his time died. He was 89.
McCullough died Sunday in Hingham, Massachusetts, according to his publisher Simon & Schuster. He was in poor health and died less than two months after his beloved wife, Rosalee.
“I think because of David, many of us feel a double obligation,” fellow historian Jon Meacham said Monday. “One is historical record and analysis. And the other is for the reader who wants to be transported both intellectually and viscerally.”
A joyful and tireless student of the past, McCullough devoted himself to sharing his own passion for history with the general public. He saw himself as anyone, blessed with a lifetime of curiosity and the opportunity to explore the issues that mattered most to him. His fascination with architecture and construction inspired his early work on the Panama Canal and the Brooklyn Bridge, while his admiration for leaders he considered good men led him to Adams and Truman. In his 70s and 80s, he indulged his affections for Paris with 2011’s publication The Greater Journey and for aviation with a 2015 bestseller about the Wright Brothers.
Aside from his books, the handsome, white-haired McCullough had perhaps the most recognizable presence of any historian, his fatherly baritone familiar to fans of PBS’s The American Experience and Ken Burns’ epic documentary Civil War. Hamilton writer Ron Chernow once called McCullough “both the name and the voice of American history,” while Burns tweeted Monday that McCullough was a friend and “gifted teacher” to him.
McCullough’s celebrations of America’s past also led to harsh criticism of him – an affection that turned too easily into romanticism. His 2019 book The Pioneers has been accused of minimizing the atrocities committed against Native Americans as 19th-century settlers moved west. In earlier works he has been accused of avoiding the harder truths about Truman, Adams and others and of prioritizing storytelling over analysis.
“McCullough’s particular contribution was to treat large-scale historical biographies as yet another genre for audience appreciation, an exercise in character recognition, a reliable source of edification and enjoyable uplift,” wrote Sean Wilentz in The New Republic’s 2001 year Associated Press McCullough responded to criticism that he was too soft by saying that “some people not only want their leaders to have clay feet, they want them to be all clay.”
But even colleagues who found flaws in his work praised his kindness and generosity and recognized his talent. And millions of readers and the smaller circle of award winners were moved by his stories. For years, from a wireless cottage on the grounds of his home in Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, McCullough completed work on a Royal Standard typewriter that changed minds and shaped the market.
He helped increase the reputation of Truman and Adams, and he launched a wave of best-sellers about the American Revolution, including McCullough’s own 1776. Well into the 1980s his books remained popular and seemed to spark renewed interest in the subject.
“Typing on an old typewriter in the little shed where I work, I often thought of David typing on an old typewriter in a little shed very similar to mine, and felt a sense of camaraderie,” wrote Robert Caro emailed a statement to The Associated Press. “I lost a friend. The world has lost a great man of letters.”
McCullough received the National Book Award for “The Path Between the Seas” on the construction of the Panama Canal; and for Mornings on Horseback, a biography of Theodore Roosevelt; and Pulitzers for “Truman” in 1992 and for “John Adams” in 2002. “The Great Bridge,” a lengthy investigation into the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge, was ranked #48 on Modern Library’s list of the top 100 non-fiction books of the 20th century and is still widely regarded as the definitive text of the great 19th century project. On his 80th birthday, his hometown of Pittsburgh renamed the 16th Street Bridge the David McCullough Bridge.
McCullough was also a favorite in Washington, DC. He spoke at a joint session of Congress in 1989 and received a Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2006. Politicians frequently claimed to have read his books, particularly his biographies of Truman and Adams. Jimmy Carter cited “The Path Between the Seas” as a factor pushing for the 1977 treaties that returned control of the Panama Canal to Panama, and politicians on both sides of the issue cited him during the debate. Barack Obama included McCullough in a gathering of scholars that met at the White House shortly after his election.
“David brought to life some of the most important people and events of our past with rich research, vivid writing and his beautiful, recognizable, trustworthy voice,” former President George W. Bush said in a statement. “While we and our country will miss David, all we have to do is reach for the bookshelf to be with him again.”
The historian has been impartial for most of his life, but spoke out against Donald Trump in 2016, leading a group of colleagues that included Burns and Chernow in denouncing the Republican presidential nominee as a “monstrous clown with a monstrous ego.” McCullough also had a pressing concern: education. He worried that Americans knew too little about history and didn’t appreciate the sacrifices of the revolutionary eras. He often spoke on campus and before Congress, and once told a Senate committee that because of the No Child Left Behind Act, “history is being shelved in many or most schools, or taken off the stove altogether, in favor of math and reading.”
Enthusiastic about the past, McCullough was committed to preserving historic regions. He opposed the construction of a residential tower near the Brooklyn Bridge and was among the historians and writers who, in the 1990s, criticized the Walt Disney Company’s proposed Civil War theme park in a region of historic importance in northern Virginia.
“We have so little authentic and genuine left,” McCullough said at the time. “Replacing what we have with plastic, made-up history is mechanical history almost sacrilegious.”
McCullough took on a few villains in his books, particularly the devious New York politicians involved in the Brooklyn Bridge, but he preferred to write about people he liked and likened it to choosing a roommate. Disgust with Pablo Picasso’s personal life prompted him to abandon a planned book on the artist, while his biography of Adams was originally intended to include Adams and Thomas Jefferson, whose characters also proved too flawed.
McCullough, whose father and grandfather founded the McCullough Electric Company, was born in Pittsburgh in 1933. Even as a child he loved history and recalled lively conversations over dinner, portraits of Washington and Lincoln that seemed to hang in every home, and a field trip to a nearby site where Washington fought one of his earliest battles. He studied English at Yale University and met the playwright Thornton Wilder, who encouraged the young student to write. McCullough worked at the United States Information Agency, Sports Illustrated, and the American Heritage Publishing Company before deciding to write a book about an event that took place in his home state in 1889 – the Johnstown Flood, which killed more than 2,000 people was as great a disaster in its day as Hurricane Katrina was more than a century later.
McCullough researched the book in his spare time and unsuccessfully asked Little, Brown and Company to publish it. He ended up with Simon & Schuster, who published the book in 1968 – for an advance of $5,000 – and remained his publisher for the rest of his career.
The Johnstown Flood was such a success that McCullough feared being typecast as the author of the flop Bad News McCullough. Publishers asked him to write about the Chicago fire and the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. So for his next book, The Great Bridge, he told a success story. “That I knew little or nothing about civil engineering, that I was never good at math or physics, or that I wasn’t interested in mechanical things didn’t deter me in the least,” he later wrote. “I was too excited. There was so much I wanted to know.”
McCullough followed with The Path Between the Seas; and Mornings on Horseback, released in 1981 and praised by Gore Vidal as “part of a new and welcome genre: the biographical sketch.” Mornings on Horseback won the National Book Award but, as Vidal noted, was overshadowed by the publication of Edmund Morris’ Pulitzer Prize-winning The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt. It would be the last time a McCullough book received a second bill.
He had considered a biography of Franklin Roosevelt, but referred instead to Roosevelt’s less dynamic, more direct successor, Harry Truman. McCullough spent the next decade writing the book, living for a time in Truman’s hometown of Independence, Missouri, and, like the former president, making a morning walk a daily routine.
Truman, released in 1992, was a million-seller, capping and confirming a long rise in the reputation of a man who had left office 40 years earlier with an approval rating of less than 30% and was now being canonized as an honest and tenacious leader. Fans of the book included presidential hopeful Ross Perot, who outright compared himself to Truman, and first President Bush, who even consulted with McCullough during his unsuccessful bid for re-election.
“John Adams,” published in 2001, was just as popular and just as helpful to his subject when, later that same year, Congress passed legislation to erect a memorial in honor of the second president. “1776” was published in 2005, followed two years later by an illustrated edition. An HBO miniseries based on “John Adams” starring Paul Giamatti and Laura Linney aired in 2008. Tom Hanks was planning a miniseries based on McCullough’s book about the Wright brothers.
McCullough had five children and an affinity for happily married politicians like Truman and Adams that could be traced to his wife Rosalee Barnes, whom he married in 1954 and who died in June. She was his editor, muse and closest friend. At his home in Martha’s Vineyard, McCullough proudly showed visiting reporters a photo of their first meeting at a spring dance, in which the two stared at each other.