David McCullough: He Loves Good Stories

DAVID McCullough loves good stories. And you can see one coming by the look on his face. When he is about to unload a particularly juicy yarn on you, America's most popular historian puckers his lips, squints his eyes and sometimes even gives a grunt of appreciation. It's as if he has popped a sweet into his mouth and has begun sucking on it. Sitting at a large oak table in a library at the Yale Club in midtown Manhattan, the avuncular 71-year-old author has been savouring some favourite anecdotes from his new book, 1776, for about 30 minutes now, and he's just beginning.

"Think about that little fifer boy," he says, referring to a 15-year-old who makes a brief appearance in the book. "He's going down to the battlefield and then a soldier walks by with a wound on his neck. In his diary, the boy tells how he asks the man if it hurts. To which the soldier replies, 'No, it doesn't hurt; matter offact, soon as I get it tied up I'm going back to fighting.' And the boy says, 'I was never afraidthereafter."'

Courage, intimacy and a certain cinematic flair: here are the elements that have made McCullough a phenomenon in American bookselling. In a nation of so-called historical illiterates, he nearly outsells Harry Potter. His 1993 biography of president Harry Truman spent 43 weeks on The New York Times bestseller list and sold well over one million copies. His most recent book, a biography of John Adams who, until McCullough got to him, was probably the most obscure founding father, sold more than two million copies and is being turned into an 11-hour miniseries by Tom Hanks. Both books won Pulitzer prizes.

McCullough also likes overlooked figures, almost-forgotten historical events and underappreciated public structures, such as the Brooklyn Bridge. As with Simon Schama in Britain, through a combination of television, radio and print work, he has coaxed Americans into learning about historical events they had long since put away in the mothballs of their childhood educations.

The year 1776, however, is not something many people are fuzzy about. You'd have to think that the biographies of Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson and George Washington cranked out in the past few years of founding father fever have travelled every road of that year at least twice, if not three times. Not so, if you ask McCullough. "Americans go out every Fourth of July and celebrate July 4, 1776, the Declaration of Independence," he says in a rich, booming baritone, recognisable from the voiceovers he did for the film Seabiscuit. "Well, that's only part of what happened. It's all what happens to these people that I want to give credit to."

By these people, he's referring to the soldiers and generals who fought alongside the 42-year-old Virginian and future president George Washington when he was pulled reluctantly out of a gentleman's retirement to lead an army that didn't even have a name. They were also dangerously short of gunpowder, rifles and sobriety. Some soldiers didn't even have shoes.

You wouldn't have known this judging by the news arriving in London after the battle of Bunker Hill. In homage to this fact, 1776 opens in the autumn of 1775, with King George III's famous appearance at parliament, where he proclaimed the colonies in revolt and iterated the need to put a "speedy end" to the disorder.

The book then cycles back to tell the story of three notable sequences: the siege and recapture of Boston by the Americans, Washington's defeat in New York and his miraculous comeback in Trenton, when he crossed the Delaware in a hailstorm and outfoxed the formidable Hessian guard to earn a victory against the British Empire when it was, as one historian put it, "the most powerful and efficient machine for waging war in the world".

Much of this military history has been told elsewhere, but never has it been brought so vividly to life. Culling generously from first-hand accounts, diaries and logbooks, McCullough crafts an intensely visual chronicle of the battles that began the American Revolution. And he brings home just how many chances there were it could have gone another way....