Rediscover: David McCullough

David McCullough, "master of the art of narrative history," died on Sunday at age 89. He wrote a dozen books whose subjects included John Adams, Harry Truman, Theodore Roosevelt, the Wright Brothers, the Panama Canal, the Brooklyn Bridge and the Johnstown Flood. McCullough won the Pulitzer Prize twice, for Truman and John Adams; won the National Book Award twice, for The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal and Mornings on Horseback: The Story of an Extraordinary Family, a Vanished Way of Life and the Unique Child Who Became Theodore Roosevelt; and won the Francis Parkman Prize twice, for Truman and The Path Between the Seas. His first book was The Johnstown Flood, which was published in 1968. As the New York Times wrote, it "established him as one who could take a familiar story--the great dam failure in Pennsylvania in 1889 that killed more than 2,000 people--and give it a larger life."

McCullough was also a narrator and host for documentaries and TV shows. He won an Emmy for hosting the PBS series Smithsonian World. He hosted PBS's American Experience and narrated historical documentaries, including Ken Burns's The Civil War, as well as narrated the audiobook versions of many of his own books. He also had a role in the movie Seabiscuit. His own John Adams became a hit HBO mini-series starring Paul Giamatti.

McCullough's other books, besides his major prize winners, included The Great Bridge: The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge; Brave Companions: Portraits in History, an essay collection; 1776, about the military under George Washington; In the Dark Streets Shineth: A 1941 Christmas Eve Story, about the meeting of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill in Washington, D.C., just weeks after Pearl Harbor; The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris and The American Spirit: Who We Are and What We Stand For. His work has been published in 19 languages and sold more than 14 million copies in all formats. He is one of the few authors who never had one of his books go out of print. McCullough's latest title, The Pioneers: The Heroic Story of the Settlers Who Brought the American Ideal West, was published in 2019. All of his books are available from Simon & Schuster.

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