Academic trends since the 1980s, the period of McCullough’s great popularity, have been dominated by the anti-historical claptrap associated with postmodernism and the moralistic finger-wagging at the past typical of identity politics. It is a sad fact that very few academic history books are readable, let alone achieve narrative coherence. That his lack of academic training in history may have been his greatest strength is as much an indictment of the professoriate as it is a compliment to McCullough. There he majored in English, learning from noted authors such as John Hersey, Thornton Wilder, Brendan Gill, John O'Hara, and Robert Penn Warren. Born in 1933 and raised in an upper-middle class family in the leafy Point Breeze neighborhood of that most working class of cities, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, McCullough attended college at Yale University. McCullough never completed a doctoral dissertation, never held an academic post-as a matter of fact, was not even an undergraduate history major.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |