David McCullough | Biography, Books, 1776, Truman, The Pioneers, John Adams, & Facts (2024)

David McCullough (born July 7, 1933, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, U.S.—died August 7, 2022, Hingham, Massachusetts) was an American historian whose exhaustively researched biographies were both popular and praised by critics.

McCullough earned a B.A. (1955) in English literature from Yale University. After graduation he went to New York City, where he took a job at Time-Life’s Sports Illustrated magazine. In 1961 McCullough moved to Washington, D.C., to work for the United States Information Agency. He left that post in 1963 and became an editor for the American Heritage Publishing Co. While there he began work on The Johnstown Flood (1968), the success of which led him to quit his job in 1970 and devote himself full-time to writing.

His next book, The Great Bridge: The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge (1972), was followed by The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal, 1870–1914 (1977), Mornings on Horseback: The Story of an Extraordinary Family, a Vanished Way of Life, and the Unique Child Who Became Theodore Roosevelt (1981), Truman (1992), Brave Companions: Portraits in History (1992), John Adams (2001), 1776 (2005), The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris (2011), The Wright Brothers (2015), and The Pioneers: The Heroic Story of the Settlers Who Brought the American Ideal West (2019). The American Spirit: Who We Are and What We Stand For (2017) is a collection of McCullough’s speeches.

Though McCullough’s narrative approach to history received some criticism from academic historians, his works garnered an impressive list of prizes and awards, including two Pulitzer Prizes (Truman and John Adams), two National Book Awards (The Path Between the Seas and Mornings on Horseback), and two Francis Parkman Prizes from the Society of American Historians (The Path Between the Seas and Truman). He was the recipient of the 1995 Charles Frankel Prize of the National Endowment for the Humanities (now the National Humanities Medal) and a 2006 Presidential Medal of Freedom.

In addition to his writing, McCullough served as a host of the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) television programs Smithsonian World (1984–88) and The American Experience (1991–2006), and he was the narrator of PBS documentaries including Ken Burns’s Brooklyn Bridge (1981) and The Civil War (1990), along with FDR (1994), The Statue of Liberty (1996), Napoleon (2000), and Abraham and Mary: A House Divided (2001). From 1991 to 1998 McCullough was president of the Society of American Historians. He was elected (1994) to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and enshrined (2006) in the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He also served as a visiting professor or scholar in residence at a number of universities.

In 2008 McCullough’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography John Adams was made into a television miniseries on the HBO cable channel. It was the second of his presidential biographies to be filmed, following the 1995 TV movie Truman.