David McCullough has died. He was a bravura historian and public intellectual whose biographies of Harry Truman and John Adams won Pulitzer Prizes, and whose bestselling stories of American accomplishment were complemented by his work as a public television host and narrator for popular movies and documentaries, including Ken Burns’ “The Civil War.”
McCullough died Sunday at his home in Hingham, Mass., according to his publishers Simon and Schuster. He was 89 years old.
The subjects McCullough tackled were massive. The building of the Brooklyn Bridge and the Panama Canal. The Third Continental Congress in 1776. He wrote about epic figures, from Theodore Roosevelt to the Wright Brothers. McCullough seemed undaunted by his topics; they were fun for him and he made the subjects enchanting for readers. Perhaps only a McCullough treatment of Truman could’ve topped the New York Times best-seller list for nearly a year; the biography was a publishing sensation in 1992.
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