Born on the fourth of July (1920), died a week short of Christmas Day (2007). Between those dates, John Garraty personally touched the lives of thousands of students and through his writing communicated with millions.

I had come to Columbia University in the fall of 1960 to do an M.A. in American history and expecting to write a thesis on as recent a topic as feasible. I quickly discovered that the M.A. seminar on the U.S. since 1920 was taught by a professor who was a much-loved undergraduate teacher without a professional profile. Even then, I knew enough to check on the alternatives. I discovered that the 1877-1920 seminar was handled by someone named Garraty, who had published five books. I spent a year in that seminar with about a dozen other people.

John Garraty had just turned forty then, was also chairing the history program in Columbia’s School of General Studies, and had his sixth book in press. A busy man, he was nonetheless unfailingly helpful, affable, and good-humored in guiding a motley group of inexperienced pupils through the business of selecting researchable topics for a thesis and developing chapters that passed the basic literacy standard. I could not have asked for a better mentor. I learned a lot about writing from him.

A good many graduate students at Columbia could not get past the fact that Garraty was the de facto third-string 20-century U.S. historian at Columbia—that he was not Richard Hofstadter or Bill Leuchtenburg. Perhaps not, but his professional accomplishments were large all the same. His New York Times obituary [http://www.nytimes.com ] emphasizes his last big project—American National Biography—and tosses in an incomplete list of his books.

In fact, he wrote standard accounts of three important, if peripheral, figures in American history—Silas Wright, Henry Cabot Lodge, and George W. Perkins—authored a little gem on Woodrow Wilson, and produced a thoughtful guide to writing the lives of others, “The Nature of Biography.” He did a fine survey of Gilded Age America, “The New Commonwealth,” for the “American Nation” series. Later in his career, he grappled with big issues in two small books—“Unemployment in History” and “The Great Depression.” It is the latter book that features the important essay that compares the America’s New Deal to Nazi Germany’s economic program. All this adds up to a life of remarkable accomplishment.

He also served a term as a Vice-President of the American Historical Association. I had something to do with his nomination, but it was an easy sell to the nominating committee and his election an easy choice for the voters.

Garraty was a dynamic classroom lecturer with real empathy for undergraduate students. He once told me that he had turned down a visiting appointment at Berkeley in which the main assignment would have been to teach U.S. survey as a television class; he needed to be in the same room, however large, with those to whom he spoke. His major teaching impact, however, was through his textbook, “The American Nation,” of which he was sole author for many years. Mark Carnes became his collaborator for the later editions.

Few people today understand just what a landmark “The American Nation” (1966) was with lavish color portfolios unlike any that ever had been included in a college text before. It was written with one voice by an individual who understood the capabilities of average students. I used it for my U.S. survey classes; students loved it. Garraty, who acted as his own agent, told me that he negotiated a $30,000 advance, a very large sum for an academic author in those days, from Harper and Row and agreed to a lower than standard royalty rate to cover the high multicolor printing costs. Both parties had made shrewd decisions. The text sold about 100,000 copies in its first year and, more recently published by Longman, is about to go into its 13th edition. I have no idea about total sales. When I last saw Garraty several years ago, he would only say that he had lost count.

I appropriated the subtitle of John Garraty’s short life of Woodrow Wilson as the subtitle title for these thoughts. One might argue about whether his life was really “great.” I thought it was a splendid example of professionalism carried through by a fine person.