The art of David McCullough ( 1933 – 2022) – a splendid historian, a towering intellectual, and a consummate stylist of the language

Consider this life : This man lived a rich, meaningful and productive life for eighty-nine years, out of which more than fifty years was spent with the woman he met when he was seventeen, and she, eighteen, and remained married to her, until she passed away in June of this year ; he raised five children, welcomed and cuddled nineteen grandchildren and two great-grandchildren; he was a top Yale graduate in English literature who turned to history by chance and transformed it into literature; he gathered more than forty honorary doctorates for his work from universities all over the world; he has written more than a dozen best-selling books – all of them on his old typewriter – that have vividly brought American history to life; he was honored with two Pulitzer awards, three national book awards, the Presidential medal of freedom and innumerable other literary honors for the style, elegance, and power of his writing; it is a fact that his heavy tomes (on an average each book is 500 pages long), so rich in detail, and deep in significance, have remained on the New York Times bestsellers list for dozens of weeks at a stretch; he was a television personality in America and Europe, known for his scholarly presence, erudition, blue eyes, Irish-Scottish accent with a slightly nasal voice, and appeared in several award-winning documentaries to elucidate history to the educated public.

Such a life, one can confidently declare, is a life well lived, indeed. The man I have been so voluptuously sketching in the above paragraph is David McCullough, the great American historian, who passed away a couple of days ago at his home in. A rich life, fully lived, and has left behind a body of work on American history and its people that will remain unsurpassed for a long time for its accuracy, narrative brilliance, and passion.

George Macaulay Trevelyan, one of the finest historians of the twentieth century, said in one of his famous essays about writing history, that history if it all it is written should be done in such a manner that the facts are presented “in their full emotional and intellectual value to a wide public by the difficult art of literature”. In other words, history should be immensely readable, not just a series of chronological facts stitched together in a linear sequence, but as a vivid evocation of the life and times in which those events happened. Human drama is essential to give life to historical narratives. Very few historians can claim to have written history with such sparkling clarity and the emotional kernel of the times as David McCullough did about the American past for fifty years of his writing life. Book after book, flowed out of his pen in regular succession. When he published his first book, “The Johnstown Flood”, in 1968, chronicling the massive breach in a dam in Pennsylvania in 1889 that killed thousands of people, critics remarked that there was a new literary voice among historians. And Mr. McCullough never looked back. He quit his day job as an editor and turned full-time to practicing history (a phrase invented by Barbara Tuchman, the doyen of American historians, who considered the job of a historian to be more of a practitioner than a plain bookish academic).

McCullough’s brilliant biographies of John Adams and Harry Truman are works that transcended the genre of historical writing. In the tradition of the American historians, the Durants, who synthesized various aspects of our human endeavor to light up a period of history, McCullough, not only explored the biographical details about these two great Americans but also portrayed the social, moral, and political atmosphere in which they lived and functioned. While John Adams is known mainly as the architect of the American constitution and Truman for his infamous order to drop the atomic bomb on Japan, there is more to these two men than just that. A writer must be empathetic enough to understand the workings of men and women who make critical decisions under unusual circumstances and contingencies. And McCullough was just that kind of historian who was willing to do that with every book and subject he touched. He took ten years to write “Truman’, and it showed. The hardback edition of the book ran to nearly a thousand pages. And during its writing, McCullough mirrored the daily habits of Truman, such as taking long vigorous walks in the morning, as the President himself did without fail every day of his life. Commitment to a biographical subject was typical of McCullough’s involvement in the project. When he researched a subject he transformed himself into that person, transported himself into the era his subject inhabited, and the result of his labors resonated with readers, who often found the narrative deeply moving, and impossible to put down. It is not often that we see history written with so much passion and in so enchanting a style.

My first McCullough book was “Mornings on Horseback” (published in 1981), a beautiful sketch of Theodore Roosevelt ( Teddy) as a young man learning, stumbling, and growing into the politician he would one day become. I read it in 2013. I was enthralled by the easy narrative, and the compelling and evocative description of Roosevelt’s family and Teddy’s adventures. When I started collecting books, I ensured, I had every book by McCullough on my shelf. They weren’t difficult to find at all. His books have always been in print and widely sold in all bookstores, including the airports. Such is his popularity. Among all the books, I have a special affection for “The Path between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal” ( published in1977), a wonderful chronicle on how the Panama Canal – the 82 km waterway that connects the Atlantic with the pacific oceans – came to be built. It is a difficult subject, and there are numerous players in the drama, however, in McCullough’s magical hands, the materials fuse and integrate into an epic adventure. Only McCullough could have told this story from an American perspective without sounding pompous or biased.

In modern times, there is a tendency to view the study of history as just a survey of a dead past, or more dangerously, as a series of causes and effects that can be twisted this way and that, to rationalize the perversities of those in power. History is not both of the above. History is essentially the understanding of patterns of human behavior, across time and civilizations. When history is well written, it doesn’t justify any event or action, it only illuminates it, through the life and times of the men and women who lived during those times. The reason Gibbon’s “Decline and fall of the Roman Empire”, or Tuchman’s “Guns of August” are still relevant and exhilarating to read is that these studies, attempt to understand man, and not merely chronicle events that led to the decline of the Roman Empire or the sequence of blunders that precipitated the first world war respectively. In history well told, events are often the stage for the human drama to unfold. In keeping with this tradition, McCullough’s books taught American history through key personalities and events that shaped its destiny. And he wrote really well. His language was simple, clear, and striking in its impact. Even a schoolboy can read McCullough if he can keep a dictionary beside him for the few times he may have to consult it. For the most part, however, his books were unpretentious and primarily meant for a general readership, not only for the specialists.

If you haven’t yet read a McCullough book, and if you like reading well-written biographies and history, then, perhaps, it is time to taste one. Start with “John Adams”, follow it with “The path between the seas”, and then “Truman”. After this sequence, you can pick up any other McCullough volume. I promise you won’t regret the time spent. In 2003, in a landmark speech given for the Jefferson lecture series, titled “The Course of Human Events,” McCullough summarized his credo in one sentence. He said “no harm’s done to history by making it something someone would want to read.”  And his books lived up to this vision – each one of them.  He believed that readers shouldn’t be made to shy away from history because it is dry and bland, it is the duty of the historian to draw the readers into the narrative and keep them hooked. McCullogh began his Pulitzer-winning biography of John Adams with this sentence: “In the cold, nearly colorless light of a New England winter, two men on horseback traveled the coast road below Boston, heading north.” What a way to begin a work of historical biography? There is movement, suspense, and excitement in this sentence. Having gotten our attention, Mccullough doesn’t let go, we are inexorably swept into the vortex of the narrative, and before long, we are galloping our way through the eight hundred-page book with the relish and enjoyment of a full-bodied thriller. That is how history should be written.

We will miss David Mccullough.