McCullough's '1776' chronicles 'darkest year in American history'

According to David McCullough, the author had never "set foot in the 18th century" before he wrote "John Adams," and most recently "1776." The latter is his latest book, the illuminating story of one year in the long American Revolutionary War — a war McCullough believes could have gone either way.

First famous for his Harry Truman biography in 1993, McCullough, a grass-roots historian, stepped backward from the 20th century to write "John Adams" and now "1776." He considers this new book a companion work to "Adams."

"In fact," McCullough said, "the work I've done in the 18th century has been the most stimulating work of my 40-year writing life."

An accidental historian, McCullough was trained in English literature at Yale, where he thought he would be a novelist. But he worked for several magazines before he started writing history on his Royal mechanical typewriter in 1965. He still works on the same machine in his office/hut in the back yard of his Martha's Vineyard, Mass., home.

"Fortunately, I've been able to raise a family writing history — and after 40 years I'm starting to get the hang of it," McCullough said by phone from a Philadelphia hotel in the midst of his book tour. "When I was in college, I thought I'd like to write a novel or a play. I was terribly drawn to F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. But as soon as I started digging into original materials, I knew I had found what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.

"The writer's job is to get below the surface. I grew up in Pittsburgh, and writing history is like making steel. You need an awful lot of ore to make the steel. Sometimes material turns up in surprising places. That is the kick in working with historical records."

Yet McCullough enjoys the process of writing most of all. "Some people do the research and then start to write. I found it is when you start to write that you find what you need to know — so I research and write in combination all the way through. While I'm writing, people ask me what the theme is of the book, and I have no idea. I write to find out that theme."