McCullough wrote all 12 of his books on the same secondhand typewriter, typing with only four fingers; he sometimes playfully suggested to children that the machine itself might be writing the books. The following essay, written in 2009 to accompany a small replica edition of his Royal Standard typewriter, explains the machine’s history.

In 1965, McCullough purchased his typewriter secondhand from a store called Central Office Equipment on Post Road in White Plains, New York. Built in the United States around 1940 or 1941, the typewriter is black with chrome accents, stands nine inches tall, and features the distinctive old-style round glass keys absent from newer models. He needed a sturdy, serious machine to begin work on his first book, The Johnstown Flood (1968), which he wrote at home on nights and weekends. His daughter Melissa, then 10 years old, captured the early days in a drawing of her father at the typewriter.

More than four decades later, McCullough is still using the same machine. Given his habit of extensive rewriting, he estimates it has been worked the equivalent of at least 500,000 miles. After each project, he has it fully serviced by technician Dennis daRosa on Martha’s Vineyard. McCullough describes the physical pleasure of working at the typewriter and hearing its bell and ribbon changes. He notes that writer William Manchester shared his appreciation and also mentions Tom Hanks as a collector of vintage typewriters. 

At the time the essay was written, McCullough was at work on his ninth book and had no intention of switching methods.

This address was delivered at the National Book Festival in 2002.

McCullough insists that history, poetry, biography, and fiction are not separate endeavors, and that how a book begins is among a writer’s most consequential decisions. He admires the openings of Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men (1946) and Margaret Leech’s Reveille in Washington (1941). To illustrate the stakes of a wrong start, he recalls a boyhood hike with his brothers, when a small initial deviation nearly sent them miles off course. A book’s opening, he argues, sets everything that follows.

He discusses the opening of Leech’s book, which portrays the aging General Winfield Scott through his dining habits and domestic routines. McCullough admires it because it treats a historical figure as a full human being who eats, rests, and takes pleasure in life—something biographers often neglect.

He then shares a wide-ranging personal reading list, including: James Agee’s A Death in the Family (1957), Willa Cather’s My Antonia (1918), A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1943) by Betty Smith, Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast (1840) (McCullough’s first self-chosen bookstore purchase), works by Irwin Shaw, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Herman Wouk, Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons (1862), and all of Dickens—with Great Expectations (1861) as a personal favorite. He regrets the scarcity of great American political novels but singles out Allen Drury’s Advise and Consent (1959), Henry Adams’s Democracy (1880), and Billy Lee Brammer’s The Gay Place (1961). He cites John le Carré’s A Small Town in Germany (1968) and Thomas Flanagan’s The Tenants of Time (1988). Three writers who personally befriended him—Conrad Richter, Paul Horgan, and Thornton Wilder—earn special mention; Richter in particular impressed upon him the difference between the right word and the wrong one, invoking Mark Twain’s comparison of lightning to the lightning bug.

Among histories and biographies, he recommends Cecil Woodham-Smith’s The Reason Why (1953), Frederick Lewis Allen’s Only Yesterday (1931), Walter Lord’s A Night to Remember (1955) as a model of disciplined omission, Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August (1962), Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Wind, Sand and Stars (1939), Harry McPherson’s A Political Education (1988), Lord David Cecil’s Melbourne (1954), William Manchester’s American Caesar (1978), Robert Caro’s The Years of Lyndon Johnson (1982–), Henri Troyat’s Tolstoy (1965), and Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson (1791). For autobiography, he favors Henry Adams’s The Education of Henry Adams (1907), Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography (1791), and Delacroix’s Journal (1893), from which he draws a maxim that accuracy serves imagination—capturing what historical writing requires: enough imaginative empathy to inhabit another era without distorting the facts.

McCullough identifies Shakespeare, the Bible, and Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), as foundational texts for understanding the 19th-century American mind, linking Bunyan’s scene of Christian facing the beast Apollyon to Theodore Roosevelt’s philosophy on courage. He also recommends Somerset Maugham’s The Summing Up (1938) and Churchill’s Painting as a Pastime (1948) for writers, and Howard Evans’s insect study Life on a Little-Known Planet (1968) for perspective. He describes the pleasure of reading Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations and notes that phrases from Shakespeare, Milton, and Cervantes often go unrecognized in everyday speech.

McCullough closes with two historical anecdotes: Abigail Adams’s famous letter urging attention to women, which drew on a poem by Daniel Defoe, and Nathan Hale’s last words, which were a quotation from Joseph Addison’s play Cato (1713), and which McCullough believes Hale delivered deliberately to mock his English captors. McCullough ends by celebrating the extraordinary abundance of reading choices available today.

McCullough studied drawing and painting throughout his life and painted watercolors regularly, often working on themed series between book projects. The following address was his 2004 commencement speech at the Lyme Academy of Fine Arts in Connecticut.

McCullough opens with the story of Winston Churchill, who in the spring of 1915 was abruptly removed from power and consumed by anxiety. Painting came to Churchill’s rescue: He became an accomplished painter and later encouraged General Eisenhower to take up painting as a means of sustaining the psychological strain of wartime command. Eisenhower did so and, while never reaching Churchill’s level of skill, also became a capable painter in his own right.

McCullough draws a line between Churchill’s dual identity as statesman and painter, and French painter Eugène Delacroix’s parallel interest in historical writing. Delacroix reflected that the historian’s craft demands holding many elements simultaneously while preserving the animating warmth that lifts a narrative above a dry recitation of facts. History, McCullough concludes, is at its best a form of literature, and thus a form of art. The two are inseparable.

In his own practice, McCullough turns to paintings as primary historical sources. The portraits of John Trumbull, John Singleton Copley, Charles Willson Peale, and Gilbert Stuart, he argues, give us the faces and the humanity of the founders in ways that documents cannot. More broadly, art preserves entire eras of the American past: The Ashcan painters captured the turn of the century in New York, the 1913 Armory Show was as significant an event as the opening of the Woolworth Building that same year, and the work of Edward Hopper and Jackson Pollock speaks to their times as powerfully as any political memoir. Their names will outlast those of most politicians. A complete chronicle of American history could be assembled from the work of Connecticut painters alone, from Trumbull to Jim Dine.

McCullough praises Trumbull specifically for a life of extraordinary breadth: Trumbull was a soldier, diplomat, architect, memoirist, and founder of the first university-affiliated art gallery in America. McCullough then invokes Churchill’s distinction between those who work hard but treat their leisure as separate from their work, and those fortunate few for whom work and joy are identical. He urges the graduating class to join the latter group. He closes with Robert Henri’s exhortation to paint with exuberance. 

A final editorial note records that McCullough lived by that spirit and died on August 7, 2022.