This could go on for days. Hass spent his early years in San Francisco before the family moved in 1945 across the Golden Gate Bridge to San Rafael, a small town in then-rural Marin County.

Insight comes, more often than not, from looking at what’s been on the table all along, in front of everybody, rather than from discovering something new. And though he would become known around the world for his poems—sometimes giving them titles like “Novella” and “A Story about the Body”—his first publication was a piece of prose fiction in a Faulknerian vein, printed in his college magazine. And I like books about accomplishment.Yeah, but it’s also about their journey, how do they come out of this catastrophe, what do they do.Right after that book was published I had two different publishers come to me offering me an advance. When we were little kids, we used to make a lake of gravy in our mashed potatoes; then we’d take a fork, break the potatoes, and say, The Johnstown flood!—with no idea why in the world we did it. David McCullough A Revolutionary idea BookPage interview by Edward Morris. Then Agassiz would leave. Don’t need that. I very often don’t know what’s in for my subject, and that’s one of the reasons I keep the reader in suspense. You gotta start writing. Here was a world-celebrated writer for us to talk to, to have lunch with—imagine!—and he was easy to talk to, delightful.

June 2005 The reader that David McCullough imagines peering over his shoulder as he crafts his meticulously researched histories and biographies is the person he happens to be writing about at the time, whether it's John Adams, Harry Truman or some anonymous soldier in a long-forgotten battle.

A lot of it has to do with scale. Seeing is as much the job of an historian as it is of a poet or a painter, it seems to me.
Harry Sinclair Drago.

He attended Yale, where he studied English and visual arts, and got a job at He has won the Pulitzer Prize, two National Book Awards, the Francis Parkman Prize and dozens of other honors, and not a single one of his books—including Would you tell us about the motto tacked over your desk?

In fact, I was searching for a symbol of affirmation, because I know that we human beings can be very short-sighted, irresponsible, stupid, but that we aren’t always, so I wanted as an antidote for having been through the Johnstown story to do something that was admirable, noble, and that has stood the test of time. I waited for my chance and walked over. Yes, he said, that’s right. Photo courtesy of the author. We were sitting in the McCulloughs’ low-ceilinged living room, which became progressively darker as the tape recorder rolled on, so that by the end of the afternoon, with the lights off, only the nineteenth-century library across the street was clearly visible. I became extremely curious to know what had happened and why. No quoting of present-day historians to substantiate my point.

McCullough’s wife Rosalee was present throughout the interview. Every day? I’m often surprised at the turns the book will take.No, I have no outline. His mother struggled with alcoholism and his father seemed to hate his job, and “neither,” Hass would recall, “seemed to be having their lives.” He grew up hunting and fishing, and would one day raise his own children blackberrying and mushrooming and birding around the Bay Area.Hass also produced two volumes gathering some of his essays and reviews—Our conversation began in 2010, but we didn’t finish it until this January.
During the entire time, almost eight hours, McCullough spoke vigorously and quickly, growing hoarse but never seeming tired.In person the sixty-six-year-old McCullough is somewhat different from the image projected on public television, where he frequently hosts and narrates programs. Interviews. This doesn’t mean the attacks were planned. I was hardly out of the gate as a writer and being typecast as Bad News McCullough — I didn’t want that. How do you do that?

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