Wednesday, August 10, 2022

There’s an old writer’s adage: keep your hero in trouble. DAVID McCULLOUGH

“I think of writing history as an art form,” Mr. McCullough said in an interview for “Painting With Words,” a short 2008 documentary about him on HBO. “And I’m striving to write a book that might — might — qualify as literature. I don’t want it just to be readable. I don’t want it just to be interesting. I want it to be something that moves the reader. Moves me.”

He went a step further, inhabiting his characters like an actor preparing for a role. While writing “The Great Bridge,” he grew a beard, like the engineer Washington Roebling. Working on “Truman,” he formed the habit of taking brisk early morning walks, just as the president had done.

“People often ask me if I’m working on a book,” he said in an interview with The New York Times in 1992. “That’s not how I feel. I feel like I work in a book. It’s like putting myself under a spell. And this spell, if you will, is so real to me that if I have to leave my work for a few days, I have to work myself back into the spell when I come back. It’s almost like hypnosis.”

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In 1951 he went to Yale, where he became a member of Yale’s secretive student society Skull and Bones and was inspired by an English faculty that included Robert Penn Warren, John O’Hara and John Hersey. Lunchtime conversations with the novelist-playwright Thornton Wilder, he later said, especially influenced his approach to choosing subjects — first, be intensely interested in them — and taught him the importance of maintaining “an air of freedom in the story line,” even when writing nonfiction.

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In 2003, he was chosen by the National Endowment for the Humanities to deliver the prestigious Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities in Washington. He spoke of the founders’ notion of the pursuit of happiness — which, he said, did not mean “long vacations or material possessions or ease.” Rather, he said, “as much as anything it meant the life of the mind and spirit.”

“It meant education,” he added, “and the love of learning, the freedom to think for oneself.”

Personally, he said: “The reward of the work has always been the work itself, and more so the longer I’ve been at it. The days are never long enough, and I’ve kept the most interesting company imaginable with people long gone.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/08/books/david-mccullough-dead.html

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