“Nothing about the harsh landscape differed from other winters,” McCullough writes. McCullough’s narrative imbues the scene with portent, in part by emphasizing the banality of the Revolutionary moment, and of Adams, the revolutionary. In this way, McCullough not only tells an 18th-century tale, but emulates an 18th-century book.Īdams is first seen on a cold January day in 1776, riding with a young companion along the road from Braintree to Cambridge, where the Continental Army was encamped, a stopover on the 400 miles to Philadelphia where the Continental Congress was meeting.

Not the feel of a fast-paced, contemporary novel, but of a slow-building, discursive novel of the era, the kind that Adams might have read–and the kind McCullough did read (Tobias Smollett’s The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker), not once, but twice, as he wrote the Adams biography. McCullough begins his case with an opening chapter that has a novelistic feel. McCullough’s burden is to make the story of Adams alone as interesting as the subplot of his complicated comradeship with Jefferson. But in the end, this is a biography of the less familiar half of the pair. The Adams-Jefferson relationship is a thread that runs through the book.

The book’s publication marks the 225th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, on which they collaborated so closely, and recognizes the extraordinary coincidence of Adams and Jefferson dying within hours of each other on July 4, 1826. Initially, he was interested in the relationship between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson–wartime comrades, political rivals, and, finally, treasured friends. McCullough has spoken frequently about the genesis of the project. In making Adams stand out from the Revolutionary pack, McCullough has his work cut out for him. His place among the country’s founding fathers is unquestioned, and as principal author of the Massachusetts state constitution (the model for the US constitution), Adams is properly revered here, but less so outside the Bay State. In contrast, Adams is a more difficult subject to make a star out of. And though McCullough’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography raised Truman’s popular profile, it was hardly needed to establish his place in history. Adams, however, was also overshadowed in the national memory by his successor, Thomas Jefferson.

Like Adams, who followed in the footsteps of George Washington, Truman was a president seemingly dwarfed by his predecessor, Franklin D. It is a task with similarities to McCullough’s previous venture into presidential biography, his 1992 Truman, but also challenging differences. And it is as our public historian that McCullough has written a biography of John Adams, the least understood and least appreciated of the early leaders of the Republic. As the host of the PBS American Experience documentaries, David McCullough is the closest thing America has to a public historian.

Truman by david mccullough summary