Barbara W. Tuchman – Author Biography
Early Life
Barbara Wertheim Tuchman was born on January 30, 1912, in New York City, into a prominent family — her father was a wealthy banker and philanthropist, and her grandfather was Henry Morgenthau Sr., the U.S. ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. She graduated from Radcliffe College in 1933 and worked briefly as a research assistant and journalist, including a stint covering the Spanish Civil War for The Nation. After marrying physician Lester Tuchman and raising three daughters, she turned to writing history in middle age, largely self-taught as a historian.
Career
Tuchman’s first major success was The Zimmermann Telegram (1958), about the German plot that helped draw America into World War I. But it was The Guns of August (1962), her dramatic narrative of the first month of World War I, that made her famous — it won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 1963 and reportedly influenced President Kennedy’s handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Stilwell and the American Experience in China (1971) won her a second Pulitzer. She went on to write A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century (1978), a vivid portrait of medieval Europe in crisis; The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam (1984), her meditation on why governments pursue policies contrary to their own interests; and The First Salute (1988), on the American Revolution. She died on February 6, 1989.
Major Works
Tuchman’s major works are The Zimmermann Telegram (1958), The Guns of August (1962), Stilwell and the American Experience in China (1971), A Distant Mirror (1978), The March of Folly (1984), and The First Salute (1988).
Writing Style and Themes
Tuchman wrote narrative history with novelistic sweep, reconstructing the past through telling detail and dramatic scenes. Though she held no PhD, she insisted on rigorous archival research and wrote with a journalist’s clarity. Her great theme was folly — the recurring human tendency of leaders to blunder into catastrophe, from the generals of 1914 to the architects of Vietnam. She believed history’s value lay in its lessons, and she wrote for the general reader, not the academy, with a moralist’s conviction that the past judges the present.
Legacy
Barbara Tuchman won the Pulitzer Prize twice, a rare achievement, and did more than almost any historian of her era to bring serious history to a popular audience. The Guns of August remains the classic account of the outbreak of World War I, and her concept of the “march of folly” entered the political vocabulary. The Tuchman Prize, awarded by the Society of American Historians, honors her memory.
