David McCullough was a young researcher at the US Information Agency when he walked into the Library of Congress in 1961 and stumbled upon a photographic exhibit depicting the 1889 flood in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, the deadliest in American history.
“I was struck by the violence revealed in them, the destruction,” Mr. McCullough, who was from the same area of western Pennsylvania, later told the Johnstown Tribune-Democrat. More than 2,200 people died and a booming coal and steel town was submerged in muddy debris because wealthy industrialists had neglected a dam.
The passage of time has relegated the tragedy to a historical footnote, Mr. McCullough found, with little, if any, serious scholarly study devoted to it. Undaunted by his own inexperience—”I fancied myself a writer, but never a writer of history,” he said—he set out to write a book about the Johnstown flood.
For years, he devoted his spare time to his research, interviewing the few remaining survivors to capture their memories of sudden terror, desperate acts of self-preservation, and the terrible duty, in the aftermath, of identifying the dead.
The Johnstown Flood, published in 1968, became a bestseller, reignited national interest in the disaster, and immediately established its author as a historian with an extraordinary gift for bringing history to life.
Mr. McCullough, long regarded as a master storyteller of American courage, drive and perseverance, died Aug. 7 at his home in Hingham, Massachusetts. He was 89 years old.
His daughter Dori Lawson confirmed the death but did not give a specific cause.
In a career spanning more than five decades, Mr. McCullough produced wildly popular volumes on subjects such as the construction of the Panama Canal and the Brooklyn Bridge. It brought attention to largely unknown but extraordinary people who battled disease, bureaucracy and bribery to see such inspiring visions come to fruition.
His biographies of two underappreciated presidents, John Adams and Harry S. Truman, shed light on their achievements and earned him two Pulitzer Prizes.
When he turned his attention to the great forces and figures in American history, such as the American Revolution (“1776”) or President Theodore Roosevelt (“Mornings on Horseback”), he brought to life the grand sweep of time and place, as well as the colorful, minute historical details , which characterize his widely praised storytelling skills.
With his sonorous and brooding voice, commanding presence and shocking white hair, Mr. McCullough has appeared frequently on television series such as PBS’s “The American Experience.” He often collaborates with filmmaker Ken Burns and narrates Burns’ Emmy Award-winning documentary series The Civil War.
“He had a profound influence on everything I did because he taught me how to tell a story,” Burns told an audience in 2015.
Mr. McCullough’s honors include two National Book Awards and the Presidential Medal of Freedom presented in 2006 by George W. Bush.
“History matters. That’s what I tried to convey,” Mr. McCullough told the Patriot Ledger of Quincy, Mass., in 2017. “It’s essential to understand our nation’s history, the good and the bad, the highs and lows. And so much of our story has yet to be told.
To a generation of younger historians, among them Walter Isaacson, Mr. McCullough was a generous mentor as well as an inspiration. “At one point when I was very young, we were talking about the various founding fathers and he said, ‘I’m going to do John Adams and you have to do Benjamin Franklin,'” Isaacson said in an interview. “I felt like I could share a feast with the chef.”
When he got stuck writing one of his own best-selling historical profiles, Isaacson would turn to a passage from Mr. McCullough’s “John Adams” or “Truman” to “try to get into the rhythms that mark the most his great passages’.
Mr. McCullough’s writing style was deceptively accessible, often belying years spent digging through dusty archives for that eloquent letter, document or record that could bring a story to life.
In the course of researching “Truman” (1992), Mr. McCullough moved for a time to the 33rd president’s hometown of Independence, Missouri, to pick up the local accent and almost literally follow in the former president’s footsteps on his brisk morning walks. Years earlier, while writing The Great Bridge (1972), he grew a beard in an attempt to immerse himself in the life of one of the key builders of the Brooklyn Bridge.
“The only way I can achieve this sense of my object is when I’ve absorbed so much information about it, I know it from every angle and direction, and I can use all those resources to imagine I’m there,” Mr McCullough told the New York Times.
“People often ask me if I work On a book,” he continued. “I don’t feel that way. I feel like I’m working in a book. It’s like being enchanted. And this spell, if you will, is so real to me that if I have to leave my job for a few days, I have to work the spell again when I come back. It’s almost like hypnosis.
Working for most of his career in a small windowed shack behind his farm in West Tisbury, Mass., on Martha’s Vineyard, Mr. McCullough tapped on a 1940 Royal manual typewriter bought for $25 in 1965.
“I like the tangible part of it,” he told the Times. “I like rolling the paper and pushing the lever at the end of the line. I like the bell that rings like an old train. … I even like to squash pages that don’t work. … I don’t like the idea that technology can fail me, and I don’t like the idea that words don’t really mean anything.”
David Gaub McCullough was born, the third of four sons, in Pittsburgh on July 7, 1933. His father was a businessman and his mother was a homemaker. He graduated in 1951 from the private Shady Side Academy, then entered Yale University, where he majored in English literature. He became the lunch companion of novelist and playwright Thornton Wilder, who advised him one day to “write the book you would like to read.”
After receiving his degree in 1955, Mr. McCullough wrote for Sports Illustrated, the Architectural Forum and Time magazine before joining the United States News Agency in 1961. Later, while working at American Heritage Publishing in New York, he made his literary debut with The Johnstown Flood, the success of which allowed him to concentrate entirely on his books.
His next idea came to him over lunch one day on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, when his fellow diners, including an engineer, began discussing the nearby Brooklyn Bridge as a 19th-century engineering marvel.
“I think the most phenomenal thing about the Brooklyn Bridge is that it works today,” Mr. McCullough told The Washington Post in 1981. “And we’re in an age where practically nothing works. They were building the bridge to last forever.
In The Great Bridge, Mr. McCullough explores the technological challenges, political intrigue and human drama — including the accidents and diseases that maimed and killed the builders — behind the world’s grandest suspension bridge.
In the library of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the alma mater of Chief Engineer Washington Roebling, Mr. McCullough found what he described as “the legendary letter chest in the ceiling.” From the Roeblings who built the bridge — father John and son Washington — to the dishonest dealings of Chief Tweed, Mr. McCullough reveals the soul of a project that defied the parameters of engineering and courage.
Los Angeles literary critic Robert Kirsch called the book “so compelling and accomplished as to be a literary monument … the kind of work that takes us to the human center of the past.”
For Mr. McCullough, the project illuminated a crucial insight. “Discovery comes most often not from finding something unknown or long hidden, but from seeing anew what has been on the table all along,” he told Cornell University Press, where he was once a visiting professor. . He describes himself as “a foreign correspondent whose job it is to report not from another country, but from the past.”
A few years later, he met Burns, who turned The Great Bridge into his first documentary, Brooklyn Bridge (1981), with Mr. McCullough serving as narrator. Mr. McCullough later became the host and narrator of the Emmy-winning series “Smithsonian World,” which aired on PBS and featured stories about history, science and human achievement.
Mr. McCullough’s television work, including more than a decade on “American Experience,” remains secondary to his writing.
His work on the National Book Award-winning The Path Between the Seas (1977) about the Panama Canal inspired a deep interest in Theodore Roosevelt, a key player in the canal’s history. Mr. McCullough’s study of Roosevelt’s childhood, adolescence and early manhood became Mornings on Horseback (1981), which also won the National Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for biography.
Mr. McCullough said he hoped his book on Roosevelt, particularly the emphasis on the future president’s debilitating struggle with asthma, would forever dispel the caricature of Teddy the Rough Rider, who shouted “Bully!” as he climbed San Juan Hill during of the Spanish-American War.
“If you don’t understand the hell he went through as a child, you can’t understand the dimensions of his success as an adult,” Mr. McCullough told The Post.
Sometimes chance played a role in his work as a historian. The decision to write a profile of the artist Pablo Picasso took Mr. McCullough in a new but ultimately futile direction.
“I’ve always been interested in creative power and how it affects history,” he told Publishers Weekly. “I am not fond of canals or bridges; I wanted to review…
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