According to David McCullough, the author had never "set foot in the 18th century" before he wrote "John Adams," and most recently "1776." The latter is his latest book, the illuminating story of one year in the long American Revolutionary War — a war McCullough believes could have gone either way.
First famous for his Harry Truman biography in 1993, McCullough, a grass-roots historian, stepped backward from the 20th century to write "John Adams" and now "1776." He considers this new book a companion work to "Adams."
"In fact," McCullough said, "the work I've done in the 18th century has been the most stimulating work of my 40-year writing life."
An accidental historian, McCullough was trained in English literature at Yale, where he thought he would be a novelist. But he worked for several magazines before he started writing history on his Royal mechanical typewriter in 1965. He still works on the same machine in his office/hut in the back yard of his Martha's Vineyard, Mass., home.
"Fortunately, I've been able to raise a family writing history — and after 40 years I'm starting to get the hang of it," McCullough said by phone from a Philadelphia hotel in the midst of his book tour. "When I was in college, I thought I'd like to write a novel or a play. I was terribly drawn to F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. But as soon as I started digging into original materials, I knew I had found what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.
"The writer's job is to get below the surface. I grew up in Pittsburgh, and writing history is like making steel. You need an awful lot of ore to make the steel. Sometimes material turns up in surprising places. That is the kick in working with historical records."
Yet McCullough enjoys the process of writing most of all. "Some people do the research and then start to write. I found it is when you start to write that you find what you need to know — so I research and write in combination all the way through. While I'm writing, people ask me what the theme is of the book, and I have no idea. I write to find out that theme."
When McCullough got into Revolutionary War documents, he was taken by learning just how "bad off" George Washington and his army really were. He considers 1776 to be the darkest year in American history. "But we can take stock of it and draw lessons and strength from it. I didn't find Washington to be 'the marble man' as others have, hard to fathom or approach. He loved architecture, landscape design and fox hunting on the front lines. That tells you a lot about him. He had tremendous physical stamina. He was a guy who wouldn't quit. I loved his letters when he talked about wainscotting and painting at his home in Mount Vernon. I think that's how he kept his sanity!"
Although McCullough had never written military history before, he used the same technique that has served him so well with other subjects. "I try to be clear — about what was happening and why, clear to my mind and eyes. And if it is clear to me I think it will be clear to the reader.
"I like to pull things out of original letters and documents more than I do from any book. I feel I'm closest to what was happening when I deal in primary sources."
Then McCullough tries to put himself into the lives of the people he's writing about. "I ask, 'What did they know or not know? What was it like for them?' If they looked over my shoulder, would they say, 'You got it right.' Or would they say, 'No, you missed it.' And I want the reader to feel that."
McCullough loves the anecdotal material he finds. "It is what we see and remember most in life, and when you put together these little pieces, a mosaic of the person forms. Sometimes what that person saw is not representative, but even so it is their little glimpse. Very often they are in a state of confusion — they don't know what's going on."
He remembers, for example, Private Martin talking about "biscuits so hard they could break a rat's teeth." He was especially impressed with the diaries of Jabez Fitch, a Connecticut farmer who was taken prisoner by the British, then had to watch his captain, John Jewett, suffering after being bayonetted, "and he said, 'It is hard work to die.' "
McCullough said he was excited to learn the things he did about Nathaniel Green, a 33-year-old American officer with a literary bent; and John Greenwood, the 16-year-old fifer boy from Boston; and Henry Knox, the 25-year-old Boston bookseller whose determination led him to ride a horse to New York then back to Boston to deliver guns to the army.
"I want the reader to have a sense of how they struggled and suffered on our behalf. I would be disappointed if the reader didn't have a strong sense of empathy for that extremely difficult uphill climb they all had. I would like them to be in the shoes of very real people who made a difference in history and our lives."
It was, said McCullough, "a war like no other. They were embarking on a seemingly preposterous enterprise of breaking away from England and starting a new country. Yet they had no army or navy, no uniforms, some had no shoes. Washington had never commanded an army in battle in his life!
"Today we see Washington with white hair and awkward teeth, but in 1776, he was 43, the oldest one in his army except for Israel Putnam ("Old Put"), who was 57 — a man who feared nothing, right out of a story book."
In short, McCullough tries to write the kind of book he would like to read. "I've been an avid reader all my life. I feel that history is so interesting, so full of life, so full of surprises, that to ever make it dull is a terrible thing to do."
E-mail: dennis@desnews.com