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 even gives a grunt of appreciation. It’s as if he has 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 savouring some favourites from his new book, 1776, for about 30 minutes now, and he is just beginning.
“Think about that little fifer boy,” he says, referring to a 15-year-old who makes a brief appearance in this 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 — these are the elements that have made McCullough a most unusual phenomenon in American bookselling, where he almost outsells Harry Potter.
His 1993 biography of President Truman spent 43 weeks on The New York Times bestseller list and sold more than one million copies. His biography of John Adams, who, until McCullough got to him was probably America’s most obscure “founding father”, sold more than two million copies and is being turned into an 11-hour mini-series by Tom Hanks. Both books won the Pulitzer Prize.
McCullough likes overlooked figures, almost forgotten historical events, and underappreciated public structures, such as the Brooklyn Bridge. As with Simon Schama in Britain, through a combination of TV, radio and print work, he 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 travelled 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, recognisable from the voiceovers he did for the film Seabiscuit and Ken Burns’s acclaimed and perennially televised documentary of the American Civil War. “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 alongside George Washington when the 42-year-old Virginian and future president was pulled reluctantly out of a gentleman’s retirement to lead an army that didn’t even have a name. They were also dangerously short of gunpowder, rifles, and sobriety.
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 the autumn of 1775, with King George III’s famous appearance at Parliament, where he proclaimed the colonies in revolt, and demanded 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, where 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 noted, but never has it been brought so vividly to life. Culling generously from first-hand accounts, diaries, and logbooks, McCullough crafts an intensely visual chronicle of the military battles that signalled the birth of the American Revolution. And he brings home just how easily it could have gone another way.
“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,” McCullough says, pointing at a leather settee next to him, revealing at once the influence of fiction and painting — a pastime he enjoys — on 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 like a novelist, that’s not an accident. He loves fiction, especially mysteries, including the work of Ruth Rendell and Elmore Leonard. And unlike historians of the preceding generation, it was literature he studied at university, not history. “I think we began as and consider ourselves writers,” says McCullough, referring to fellow historians such as the Pulitzer prizewinner Ron Chernow, who also writes history with an English degree. “I am just a writer who has chosen as his field the events of people and times past.” As an undergraduate at Yale University — the college that produced the American presidents George H. W. Bush and son — the Pulitzer prize-winning novelist Thornton Wilder was a big influence. “You could sit down with him at the dining hall,” McCullough says, “and 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 1960s he saw a photograph of the devastation wrought by the Johnstown flood — a dam failure that drowned a Pennysylvania town — of 1889. “I was 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 that you’d like to read. And that’s when I embarked on my first book, 40 years ago this year.”
McCullough was born and raised in the mining town of Pittsburgh during the Depression and earned his writing apprenticeship at Time and Sports Illustrated. During the Sixties he worked for the unglamorous-sounding United States Information Agency, which he credits for instilling in him his respect for research.
When he began writing his book on the Johnstown flood, he was working for American Heritage Publishing, a demanding full-time job, so he carried out his research in his lunch hours at the 42nd Street Public Library in New York, and did 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,” he says. “If I knew everything about a subject, I 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”. They live in a restored farmhouse in West Tisbury, Massachusetts, a village on the island of Martha’s Vineyard. They bought their home 30 years ago for $4,000, long before the area became a holiday location for wealthy Washington residents.
McCullough writes every day in a small shed just beyond their house on a 1940 Royal manual typewriter he bought used in New York in 1965. His days of narrating history over television are probably over, he says. 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 climax that almost rattles the window panes of this stodgy old club. “Every time I start one of these projects I think, think how much I’m going to learn!”
1776: America and Britain at War by David McCullough is published by Allen Lane, £25 (offer, £20, call 0870 1608080).
John Freeman is a writer based in New York
READ ON
Truman (1992): This mammoth account of the life of America’s 33rd president won McCullough a Pulitzer Prize in biography.
