Since then, he has written nine more books. The Johnstown Flood, published in 1968, established him as a top-shelf historical writer. He served apprenticeships at Time, Life, the United States Information Agency, Sports Illustrated, and American Heritage. While working at American Heritage, McCullough found a subject that interested him deeply and spent three years writing the story of the Johnstown Flood of 1889. Wilder, says McCullough, taught him that a competent writer maintains ‘an air of freedom’ in the storyline, so that a reader will not anticipate the outcome, even if the book is non-fiction.”Īs he weighed options for his life, McCullough gravitated towards research and writing. McCullough occasionally ate lunch with the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and playwright Thornton Wilder. According to his Wikipedia biography, “He said that it was a ‘privilege’ to study English at Yale because of faculty members such as John O’Hara, John Hersey, Robert Penn Warren, and Brendan Gill. Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1933, McCullough earned a degree in English Literature from Yale University. Nrbelex at English Q52, licensed under CC BY-SA.ĭavid Gaub McCullough, that’s who. James, where he exchanged decorous greetings with the spurned monarch George III was elected vice president of the new Constitutional republic became our second president, after Washington’s two terms was defeated for his own second term by his old Revolutionary friend, Thomas Jefferson retired to an active life managing his farm in Braintree lived long enough to see his son, John Quincy Adams, inaugurated as sixth president of the United States in 1825 and died the following year on the same day as Jefferson-July 4, exactly fifty years after the two of them had, with 54 other patriots, declared the Independence of the United States.ĭavid McCullough. Oh, and by the way: He attended Harvard University, was admitted to the bar and practiced law joined the movement for American colonial rights, becoming the most forward champion of Independence in the Second Continental Congress nominated George Washington of Virginia to command the Continental Army went to France as a commissioner, helped negotiate the 1783 Treaty of Paris that ended the Revolutionary War, and became the first U.S.

He would be a farmer, on and off, all his life-persistently, passionately, and successfully. Adams junior inherited the deacon’s farm.

John Adams was born in 1735 to Deacon John Adams and Susanna Boylston Adams of Braintree, Massachusetts.

That’s the message, in a nutshell, of David McCullough’s John Adams, a monumental biography I have just read, only nineteen years after its publication. In an instant, I pegged the unprepossessing Adams as a second-rater. He was the next president after George Washington.”

John Adams by David McCullough