The biographer who brought history to life

David McCullough often opened his histories with his subject on the move, and he brought the readers along for a ride through a gripping story. Despite their formidable length, his biographies of underappreciated presidents, 1992’s Truman and 2001’s John Adams, were both best-sellers and Pulitzer Prize winners. His secret was the evocative detail supplied by his monumental research. The Adams book, for instance, described not only the revolutionary’s moral character but also the smells of Philadelphia summers and the taste of local beer. While McCullough was known for his scholarship, he also sought to inhabit his subjects, growing a beard like Brooklyn Bridge engineer Washington Roebling and taking brisk morning walks like Truman. The result was 13 lively books that have sold more than 9 million copies. “People ask me if I’m working on a book,” McCullough said in 1992. “I work in a book. It’s almost like hypnosis.”

Born in Pittsburgh to a businessman father and homemaker mother, McCullough studied English at Yale, said The Boston Globe. Lunchtime conversations there with playwright Thornton Wilder “encouraged him to become a writer.”

After a few years writing for magazines, said The Washington Post, McCullough became a fulltime historian following his first book, 1968’s The Johnstown Flood, about the 1889 Pennsylvania dam failure that killed more than 2,000 people. He bought a home in Martha’s Vineyard, Mass., and spent the rest of his life there, clattering out his works on a 1940 Royal typewriter.

McCullough was also “a natural on television,” said The New York Times, hosting the PBS series American Experience and narrating documentaries, including Ken Burns’ series The Civil War. But his writing took priority, and he was choosy about subjects, seeking people he liked enough to immerse himself in for years. Some critics said McCullough veered too close to hero worship, and his most recent book, 2019’s The Pioneers: The Heroic Story of the Settlers Who Brought the American Ideal West, was accused of romanticizing the white settlement of Native lands. But McCullough was determined to dispel the idea, as he said in 2005, “that ‘history’ and ‘boring’ are synonymous. To me, it’s the reverse. The wonderful thing about almost any subject in history is, if you scratch the surface, you find life. It’s all around us.”