David McCullough (1933-2022) was an American historian and biographer, born in Pittsburgh and educated at Yale, who worked in publishing and journalism before writing narrative histories such as The Johnstown Flood (1968), The Great Bridge (1972) and The Path Between the Seas (1977). His biographies Truman (1992) and John Adams (2001) each won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography, and his later books include 1776 (2005), The Wright Brothers (2015) and The Pioneers (2019). He was also widely known as the narrator of documentary films, and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2006.
David McCullough's John Adams is a full narrative biography of the second president of the United States, built largely on the Adams family papers and especially on the letters between John and Abigail Adams. It follows Adams from his boyhood on a farm in Braintree, Massachusetts, where he was born in 1735, through Harvard College, schoolteaching in Worcester and the law, to his marriage in 1764 to Abigail Smith, whom McCullough presents as his closest adviser and equal partner.
