![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() He followed that five years later with The Path Between the Seas (1977), the story of the Panama Canal, which won the National Book award as well as three other major history prizes, including the Francis Parkman. It took four years before his next book, The Great Bridge, was published McCullough so immersed himself in Washington Roebling, the force behind the bridge’s construction, and one of the many killed in its construction, that he grew a beard exactly like Roebling’s. The Johnstown Flood (1968) garnered excellent reviews, and McCullough decided to become a full-time writer. His first book came after he “stumbled” across the story of the 1889 Johnstown flood, a disaster that struck the steel town an hour east of his own hometown. Intending to be a playwright, he took a job with the Luce magazines, including the newly launched Sports Illustrated, then worked for the US Information Agency and finally for American Heritage magazine, then published by Forbes. After his graduation from Yale, they married. He was also a member of the secret Skull and Bones Society, many of whose members have gone on to have a profound influence on history.Īt the Rolling Rock country club in Pittsburgh in 1951 he met Rosalee Barnes. His teachers there included John O’Hara, John Hersey, Robert Penn Warren and, most influentially, the playwright Thornton Wilder, from whom he learned to maintain an “air of freedom” to avoid giving away a story to a reader he applied this to his own writing, even though history’s outcomes are always thought to be known. ![]()
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