david mccullough the pulitzer prize winning author

“I want to write for the fellow who lives next door over here, and I want to write for the president of MIT. “I want my books to be read by people of all kinds,” Mr. He wrote for the interested layperson, not graduate students. McCullough saw himself belonging to the tradition exemplified by such popular nonacademic historians as Barbara Tuchman and Bruce Catton. “I go where my curiosity goes or one story leads to another.” “I don’t consider I have a special beat, or niche, as a historian,” Mr. McCullough was a visiting professor or scholar in residence at Cornell and Wesleyan universities, the University of New Mexico, and Bennington College). McCullough as “the citizen chronicler.” He had no special field or academic affiliation (though at various times Mr. Yet the longtime Librarian of Congress James H. McCullough offered a “picturesque characterological approach to the past” that tended to make his books “an exercise in character recognition, a reliable source of edification and pleasant uplift.” McCullough’s books so accessible - a reliance on narrative at the expense of analysis, an implicit triumphalism, and a tendency to hero worship - worked to limit their intellectual value. Wilentz went on to argue that the very things that made Mr. McCullough “the handsome, authoritative face of American history - and, with his pleasantly weathered baritone, also the voice of American history.” Writing in The New Republic in 2001, Princeton historian Sean Wilentz called Mr. “He was also a gifted teacher who taught me about history and writing, and allowed me to escape my many limitations in those areas.” “He is among our greatest historians, writing with an almost magical command of language and story,” Burns said in a tweet Monday.

David mccullough the pulitzer prize winning author