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By the Book

David McCullough: By the Book

David McCulloughCredit...Illustration by Jillian Tamaki

The author, most recently, of “The Wright Brothers” originally planned to write fiction. “Again and again come vivid reminders that the truth often is not only stranger than fiction, but far more remarkable as a story.”

What books are currently on your night stand?

Two gifts from two valued friends: “The Swerve,” by Stephen Greenblatt, given to me by Morley Safer, and Winston Churchill’s delightful “Painting as a Pastime,” a gift from my former editor Michael Korda.

Who are your three favorite novelists of all time?

Anthony Trollope, Willa Cather and Wallace Stegner.

Whom do you consider the best writers — novelists, essayists, critics, journalists, poets — working today?

Alan Furst, Penelope Lively, Ruth Rendell, David Brooks, Thomas Friedman, Peggy Noonan, Maureen Dowd, Michiko Kakutani and Billy Collins.

Which books by contemporary historians — academic or amateur — do you most admire?

There’s never been a time such as now when so many first-rate writers are writing history and biography, and I read and admire the work of nearly all. To name only a few books would require omitting many too many I have no wish to bypass.

What are your favorite presidential biographies?

Dumas Malone’s multivolume life of Thomas Jefferson and Robert Sherwood’s “Roosevelt and Hopkins: An Intimate History.”

When you wrote your first book, on the Johnstown flood, did you have a model in mind, a kind of storytelling you admired?

Walter Lord’s “A Night to Remember,” about the sinking of the Titanic, was the best book about a disaster I had ever read. But in an odd way I think I was more influenced at the time by the novels of Conrad Richter, and particularly his Ohio trilogy, “The Trees,” “The Fields” and “The Town,” in the extremely skillful way he evoked a sense of place.

You studied English at Yale with some impressive writers, including Robert Penn Warren, John Hersey and Thornton Wilder. Who taught you the most about writing at college, and what did you learn?

The presence on campus of such literary giants as Penn Warren, Hersey and Wilder was inspiring in the extreme, but greater for me was the influence of the extraordinary lectures on architecture by the incomparable Vincent Scully, who taught us all to see as never before. Wasn’t it Dickens who said, “Make me see”?

You originally planned to write fiction? What made you decide to give it up? Do you feel you have a novel in you yet?

I wanted to be a writer, and that’s what I wound up being. The difference is, I write about real people, and in telling their stories, I’m not free to play around with facts or make things up. And again and again come vivid reminders that the truth often is not only stranger than fiction, but far more remarkable as a story. Would any novelist dare have John Adams and Thomas Jefferson die on the same day and have that day be the Fourth of July? Still, I don’t rule out having a go at a novel one of these days.

Who is your favorite fictional hero or heroine?

Inspector Reginald Wexford in the mysteries by Ruth Rendell, who to my mind was one of the most compelling writers of our time.

What books might we be surprised to find on your shelves?

A book I keep going back to for the sheer pleasure of the writing, as well as all it brings to life about a subject I might otherwise have taken no interest in whatever, is “Life on a Little-Known Planet,” by Howard Ensign Evans, which is all about insects. And there, too, on my shelves is a treasure house of song lyrics, “Reading Lyrics,” edited by Robert Gottlieb and Robert Kimball, who take the words of songs, as do I, as one of the joys of life.

What kind of a reader were you as a child? Your favorite books and authors?

I had the good fortune to grow up in a home amply supplied with books, and those I loved best have stayed with me in a way I could hardly have imagined. One of the earliest and most important, I’ve come to see, was “The Little Engine That Could.” (“I think I can. I think I can.”) Then there was “Horton Hatches the Egg” and “Mr. Popper’s Penguins.” And it wasn’t long before I was reading Jules Verne — “The Mysterious Island” and “Around the World in 80 Days,” which I adored. And how I loved poring over the N. C. Wyeth illustrations for “Treasure Island” and “The Last of the Mohicans”! I still do.

If you had to name one book that made you who you are today, what would it be?

“The Elements of Style,” by William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White. I read it first nearly 50 years ago and still turn to it as an ever reliable aid-to-navigation, and particularly White’s last chapter, with its reminders to “Revise and Rewrite” and “Be Clear.”

If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be?

Dean Acheson’s “Present at the Creation,” a brilliant, superbly written account of the processes of decision making during the highly eventful Truman years when Acheson was secretary of state. The book is, along with so much else, a great lesson in courage and loyalty.

You’re hosting a literary dinner party. Which three writers are invited?

If limited to the living, then Stacy Schiff, Billy Collins and Walter Isaacson. Otherwise, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., Robert Louis Stevenson and Cole Porter.

Disappointed, overrated, just not good: What book did you feel you were supposed to like and didn’t? Do you remember the last book you put down without finishing?

I recently reread, or started to reread, Sherwood Anderson’s “Winesburg, Ohio,” which when I first read it long ago I knew I was supposed to like and did. This time I found it flat and slow, and after 50 pages or so, I put it down.

What books do you find yourself returning to again and again?

The delightful and very funny 18th-century fictional travel adventures of one Matthew Bramble and family, to be found in “The Expedition of Humphry Clinker,” by Tobias Smollett; “Moon Tiger,” by Penelope Lively; Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s “Wind, Sand and Stars”; Walker Percy’s “The Moviegoer”; the stories of William Trevor; and the letters of Flannery O’Connor.

What books are you embarrassed not to have read yet?

Mainly, “Middlemarch,” by George Eliot, which I’ve had every good intention to undertake. Maybe this is the year!

What book do you plan to read next?

“The Second Son,” by Jonathan Rabb.

A correction was made on 
Aug. 18, 2015

An earlier version of this interview misspelled the given name of the character in the title of a novel by Tobias Smollett. The book is “The Expedition of Humphry Clinker,” not “The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker.”

How we handle corrections

A version of this article appears in print on  , Page 10 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: By the Book: David McCullough. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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