Barbara Tuchman Biography and List of Works

American writer, noted for her popular histories. Tuchman is praised for her lucid style, narrative power and portrayal of the protagonists in world dramas as believable human beings. Meaning, in Tuchman's view, emerges not from preconceived design but from the aggregation of details and events that fall into a pattern. Tuchman was a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, whose subjects range from the Trojan War to the Vietnam War, from descriptions of medieval life to portraits of world leaders of the First World War.

"For one August in its history Paris was French - and silent."
(From August 1914, 1962)

Barbara Tuchman was born in New York City. Her grandfather, Henry Morgenthau Sr., was Woodrow Wilson's Ambassador to Turkey and her father was a banker, who bought The Nation magazine from the Villards when it was on the verge of bankruptcy. Tuchman was educated at Radcliffe College and Cambridge, Mass. From 1934 to 1935 she worked as a research assistant at the Institute of Pacific Relations in New York and Tokyo, and then started her career as a journalist contributing to several magazines. Tuchman was the editorial assistent of The Nation, a staff writer of War in Spain, and an American correspondent for the New Statesman in London (1939), with Far East News Desk and Office of War Information (1934-45).

Tuchman's first book, THE LOST BRITISH POLICY, was published in 1938, after the Loyalist had won the Spanish Civil War, a conflict she regarded as the end of the liberal world. In 1941 she married Lester R. Tuchman; they had three children. Tuchman was a trustee at Radcliffe College (1960-72), a lecturer at Harvard University, University of California, U.S. Naval War College, and other institutions. In 1979 she was appointed the chairperson of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She also received a number of honorary degrees. Tuchman died on February 6, 1989.

"Dead battles, like dead generals, hold the military mind in their dead grip and Germans, no less than other peoples, prepare for the last war."
(from August 1914)

Tuchman became well known in the 1960s with the publication of THE GUNS OF AUGUST (1962), a study of the events leading up to World War I. It is considered by most critics to be her best work, although historians generally contest the thesis of the work - that the outcome of the war was decided during the first month. "No more distressing moment can ever face a British government than that which requires it to come to a hard, fast and specific decision." The Guns of August traces the actions of statesmen and patriots alike in Berlin, London, St. Petersburg and Paris. The book of the first 30 days of the first global war won The Pulitzer Prize. He second Pulitzer Prize came from the biography of U.S. General Joseph Stilwell (1971), in which she explored the United States' relationship with 20th-century China as epitomized in the wartime experiences of General Stilwell. With regard to U.S. foreign policy in China it asks, "how could America act so confidently when it knew it was wrong?"

Among her other works are A DISTANT MIRROR (1978), which presents a vivid picture of life in 14th-century France, paralleling its natural and man-made disasters to our own century. In THE MARCH OF THE FOLLY (1984) Tuchman examines four conflicts and turning points in history: The Trojan War, The Protestant Secession, The American Revolution and The American War in Vietnam. "Character is fate," is one of Tuchman central themes - of course the Trojans suspected that the famous horse was full of Greeks or a cunning threat, but they did what their enemies wanted them to do. Presidents Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon and the men who surrounded were competent and did not lose the Vietnam War through ignorance, which for Tuchman provides another example of how fatally flawed the psychology of a governing class remains. "The power to command frequently causes failure to think," concludes the author who sees that folly is a child of power. Later, in her essay 'Learning from History,' she states that young people opposed to war shouldn't turn their backs on military service and other Vietnams can be prevented only by the presence of the college-educated in the military.

In THE FIRST SALUTE (1988) Tuchman analyses the American Revolution. She places the war in the historical context of centuries-long conflicts between England and both France and Holland, and paints a vivid portrait of General George Washington. The title of the book refers to a salute of gunfire on November 16, 1776, when St. Eustatius, a small island in the West Indies, acknowledged a ship flying the red-and-white flag of the Continental Congress, thus recognizing American sovereignty. PRACTICING HISTORY (1981) is a collection of essays, in which Tuchman presents the historian as a storyteller who discovers a thesis only after the material is thoroughly studied and understood. Historians must know when to stop research and start writing it. ''It is laborious, slow, often painful, sometimes agony. It means rearrangement, revision, adding, cutting, rewriting. But it brings a sense of excitement, almost of rapture; a moment on Olympus. In short, it is an act of creation.''

For further reading: New Women in Social Sciences by Kathleen Bowman (1976); Contemporary Popular Writers, ed. by Dave Mote (1997)

THE LOST BRITISH POLICY, (1938)