David McCullough loves good stories. And you can see one coming by the look on his face.
When he is about to unload a particularly juicy yarn on you, America’s most popular historian puckers his lips, squints his eyes and sometimes gives even a grunt of appreciation. It’s as if he’s popped a sweet into his mouth and has begun sucking on it.
Sitting at a large oak table in a library at the Yale Club in midtown Manhattan, the avuncular 71-year-old author has been savoring some favorites from his new book, “1776,” for about 30 minutes now, and he’s just beginning.
“Think about that little fifer boy,” says McCullough, referring to a 15-year-old who makes a brief appearance in this new book. “He’s going down to the battlefield, and then a soldier walks by with a wound on his neck. In his diary, the boy tells how he asks the man if it hurts. To which he replies, ‘No, it doesn’t hurt; matter of fact, soon as I get it tied up I’m going back to fighting.’ And the boy says, ‘I was never afraid thereafter.”‘
Courage, intimacy and a certain cinematic flair – here are the elements that have made McCullough a most unusual phenomenon in American bookselling. In a nation of so-called historical illiterates, he nearly outsells “Harry Potter.”
McCullough’s 1993 biography of President Truman spent 43 weeks on The New York Times’ best-seller list and sold well over 1 million copies. His most recent book – a biography of John Adams, who until McCullough got to him was probably America’s most obscure Founding Father – sold more than 2 million copies and is being turned into an 11-hour TV miniseries by Tom Hanks. Both books won the Pulitzer Prize.
McCullough likes overlooked figures, almost forgotten historical events and underappreciated public structures, like the Brooklyn Bridge. As with Simon Schama in Britain, through a combination of TV, radio and print work, McCullough has coaxed Americans into learning about historical events they had long since put away in the mothballs of their childhood educations.
The year 1776, however, is not something many people are fuzzy about. Surely, the biographies of Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson and George Washington cranked out in the past few years of Founding Father fever have traveled every road of that year at least twice. If not three times. Not so, if you ask McCullough.
“Americans go out every Fourth of July, and we celebrate July 4, 1776, the Declaration of Independence,” he says in a rich booming baritone, recognizable from the voice-overs he did for the film “Seabiscuit” and Ken Burns’ perennially running “Civil War” documentary. “Well, that’s only part of what happened. It’s all what happens to these people that I want to give credit to.”
By these people, McCullough is referring to the soldiers and generals who fought beside the 42-year-old Virginian and future president, George Washington, when he was pulled reluctantly out of a gentleman’s retirement to lead an army that didn’t even have a name. The army also was dangerously short of gun powder, rifles and sobriety. Some soldiers didn’t even have shoes.
You wouldn’t have known this judging by the news arriving in London after the battle of Bunker Hill. In homage to this fact, “1776” actually opens in fall 1775, with King George III’s famous appearance at Parliament, where he proclaimed the colonies in revolt, and iterated the need to put a “speedy end” to the disorder.
The book then cycles back to tell the story of three notable sequences – the siege and recapture of Boston by the Americans, Washington’s defeat in New York and his miraculous comeback in Trenton, when he crossed the Delaware in a hailstorm and outfoxed the formidable Hessian guard to earn a victory against the British Empire when it was, as one historian put it, “the most powerful and efficient machine for waging war in the world.”
Much of this military history has been told elsewhere, as critics have already noted, but never has it been brought so vividly to life. Culling generously from firsthand accounts, diaries and logbooks, McCullough crafts an intensely visual chronicle of the military battles that signaled the birth of the American Revolution. And he brings home just how many chances there were for events to turn out differently.
“When I say I love the admonition of Dickens, to ‘make me see,’ it doesn’t just mean seeing how the light falls on that chair,” says McCullough, pointing at a leather settee next to him, revealing at once the influence of fiction and painting (which he does on the side) upon his work.
“It means to make me understand. I don’t want the reader to ever lose sight of the fact that the people they are reading about never had any idea how it would turn out. I want them to suspend their disbelief, and remember that things could have gone another way.”
If McCullough sounds a bit like a novelist, that’s not an accident. He loves fiction, especially mysteries, like the work of Ruth Rendell and Elmore Leonard. And unlike historians of the generation preceding his, it was literature he studied in college, not history.
“I think we began and consider ourselves writers,” says McCullough, referring to fellow historians like Pulitzer winner Ron Chernow, who also writes history with an English degree. “I am just a writer who has chosen as his field events of people and times past.”
As an undergraduate at Yale University, the same college that produced American presidents George H.W. Bush and son, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Thornton Wilder was a big influence.
“You could sit down with him at the dining hall,” says McCullough, “have a cup of coffee with him after dinner. He was a very approachable, very friendly man. He was once asked how he got the idea for the books he wrote. He replied, ‘I imagine a story I’d like to see portrayed or a story I’d like to read that nobody has written in a novel, and I write it.’ I never forgot that.”
McCullough kept that in mind when, in the early ’60s, he saw a photograph of the devastation wrought by the Johnstown Flood of 1889.
“I was just curious to know more. So I took a book out of the library, and it was not very good. And I took another book out of the library, and that was less satisfactory. And I think, inspired by what Mr. Wilder said, I thought, why not write a book about the Johnstown flood you’d like to read. And that’s when I embarked on my first book, 40 years ago this year.”
Just as the American Revolution he describes in “1776” began with humble origins, so too did McCullough in a way. Born and raised in the mining town of Pittsburgh during the Depression, he earned his writing apprenticeship at Time Inc. and Sports Illustrated.
During the 1960s he worked for the deeply unglamorous sounding United States Information Agency, which he credits for instilling a respect for research in him.
When he began writing his book on the Johnstown flood, McCullough was working for American Heritage Publishing, a demanding full-time job, so he performed his research over lunch hours at the 42nd Street Public Library in New York, and his writing at night after his children had been put to bed. The excitement over his discoveries kept him going.
“It’s been said before, but I write to discover,” says McCullough. “If I knew everything about a subject, I probably wouldn’t want to write a book about it.”
McCullough has been married for more than 50 years to Rosalee Barnes, the mother of his five children, and “my best editor,” as he has said. They live together in a restored farmhouse they bought 30 years ago for $4,000 in West Tisbury, Mass., a small village on the island of Martha’s Vineyard, long before that area became a popular vacation spot for wealthy Washingtonians.
McCullough writes every day in an 8-by-12-foot shed just beyond their house on a 1940 Royal manual typewriter he purchased used in White Plains, N.Y., in 1965. His days of narrating history over television, he says, are probably over. But not writing history. “To me, it’s a journey, it’s a travel experience, only it’s going into another time, not another country,” he says, rising to a crescendo that nearly rattles the windowpanes of this stodgy old club. “Every time I start one of these projects I think, ‘Think how much I’m going to learn!”‘
John Freeman is a writer in New York.
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In person
David McCullough will appear at 7:30 p.m. Thursday at the Tattered Cover Book Store, 1628 16th Street, in LoDo. Free tickets for places in line will be handed out at 6:30 p.m. He also will be at the Denver Press Club’s Lunch on Deadline program at noon Friday at the Denver Athletic Club, 1325 Glenarm Place. Tickets are $20 for members, $25 for non-members. Call 720-931-6810.
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1776
By David McCullough
Simon & Schuster, 400 pages, $32
