A short life of the author
Barbara Wertheim Tuchman (30 January 1912 – 6 February 1989) was an American historian and author who won the Pulitzer Prize twice and who was, by any reasonable measure, the finest American narrative historian of the twentieth century. Her books — The Guns of August (1962), A Distant Mirror (1978), The Proud Tower (1966), The March of Folly (1984), and others — combine meticulous archival research with a gift for dramatic storytelling that makes the past vivid, immediate, and emotionally compelling. She was not an academic historian (she held no advanced degree and never held a university position), and the academic establishment alternately admired and resented her — admired the quality of her research, resented the quality of her prose and the size of her readership.
Life
Tuchman was born into a wealthy and prominent New York Jewish family. Her grandfather was Henry Morgenthau Sr., the American ambassador to the Ottoman Empire during World War I; her uncle was Henry Morgenthau Jr., Franklin Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Treasury. She was educated at the Walden School and Radcliffe College, graduating in 1933. She worked as a journalist, reporting from Spain during the Civil War and from China during the Japanese invasion, before turning to historical writing.
She published her first book, Bible and Sword: England and Palestine from the Bronze Age to Balfour (1956), at forty-four. Her career as a major popular historian began with The Zimmermann Telegram (1958), a study of the coded German diplomatic message that helped bring the United States into World War I.
The Guns of August (1962)
Tuchman’s masterpiece is a narrative history of the first month of World War I — from the funeral of Edward VII in 1910 through the opening campaigns of August 1914 and the Battle of the Marne. The book is extraordinary for its ability to sustain narrative tension in a story whose outcome is known: Tuchman makes the reader feel the contingency of events, the moments when the war might have gone differently, the decisions that sealed the fate of millions.
The book’s portraits of the military and political leaders — the rigidity of the German Schlieffen Plan, the French cult of the offensive, the British muddle, the Belgian King Albert’s stubborn heroism — are drawn with a novelist’s eye for character and a moralist’s eye for folly. President John F. Kennedy read the book and was so impressed by its depiction of how great powers stumble into catastrophe through miscalculation, arrogance, and failure of imagination that he distributed copies to his staff during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
The book won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 1963.
Other Major Works
The Proud Tower (1966) is a portrait of the Western world in the twenty-five years before World War I — the anarchists, the Dreyfus Affair, the Hague Peace Conferences, the rise of socialism, the last flowering of European aristocratic culture. The book is structured as a series of interconnected essays rather than a continuous narrative, and its method — building a portrait of an era through the close examination of representative phenomena — is Tuchman at her most inventive.
Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911–1945 (1971) follows General Joseph Stilwell through the Chinese Revolution, World War II, and the collapse of American policy in China. The book won Tuchman’s second Pulitzer Prize.
A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century (1978) is a history of the fourteenth century — the Black Death, the Hundred Years’ War, the papal schism, the peasant revolts — organised around the life of the French nobleman Enguerrand de Coucy. The book was written in part as a meditation on the parallels between the fourteenth century and the twentieth, and its depiction of a world consumed by plague, war, and institutional collapse resonated with readers in the late Cold War era.
The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam (1984) examines four examples of governments pursuing policies contrary to their own interests: the Trojan horse, the Renaissance popes, Britain’s loss of the American colonies, and the American involvement in Vietnam.
On Writing History
Tuchman was a passionate advocate of narrative history — history written as story, with characters, dramatic structure, and literary prose — against the quantitative, theoretical, and methodological approaches that dominated the American historical profession in the postwar era. Her essay “Practicing History” (1981) is one of the finest statements of the case for narrative history as a legitimate and necessary form. She argued that the historian’s obligation is not merely to analyse but to communicate, and that a history book that nobody reads has failed its purpose regardless of its scholarly merits. Her influence on subsequent narrative historians — including David McCullough, Ron Chernow, and Erik Larson — is direct and acknowledged.
Collecting Tuchman
The Guns of August (1962, Macmillan) in first edition with dust jacket brings $100–$300. A Distant Mirror (1978, Knopf) brings $30–$80. The Proud Tower (1966) brings $30–$60. All of Tuchman’s books have been continuously in print. Signed copies are available but not abundant.