born July 7, 1933 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, is an American author, narrator, historian, and lecturer. He is a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award and a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States' highest civilian award. McCullough earned a degree in English literature from Yale University. His first book was The Johnstown Flood (1968)
; and he has since written eight more on such topics as Harry S Truman
, John Adams
, and the Brooklyn Bridge
. McCullough has also narrated multiple documentaries, as well as the 2003 film Seabiscuit; and he hosted American Experience for twelve years. McCullough's two Pulitzer Prize-winning books, Truman and John Adams, have been adapted by HBO into a TV film and a mini-series, respectively. McCullough's most recent work, The Greater Journey
, about Americans in Paris from the 1830s to the 1900s, was released on May 24th, 2011.
At first glance, The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris might seem to be foreign territory for David McCullough, whose other books have mostly remained in the Western Hemisphere. But The Greater Journey is still a quintessentially American history. Between 1830 and 1900, hundreds of Americans--many of them future household names like Oliver Wendell Holmes, Mark Twain, Samuel Morse, and Harriet Beecher Stowe--migrated to Paris. McCullough shows first how the City of Light affected each of them in turn, and how they helped shape American art, medicine, writing, science, and politics in profound ways when they came back to the United States. McCullough's histories have always managed to combine meticulous research with sheer enthusiasm for his subjects, and it's hard not to come away with a sense that you've learned something new and important about whatever he's tackled. The Greater Journey is, like each of McCullough's previous histories, a dazzling and kaleidoscopic foray into American history by one of its greatest living chroniclers. --Darryl Campbell