Barbara Wertheim Tuchman

American · 1912 to 1989

Born Barbara Wertheim on January 30, 1912, in New York City, the daughter of the banker and magazine owner Maurice Wertheim and his wife Alma Morgenthau, she grew up in a household steeped in public affairs; her maternal grandfather, Henry Morgenthau Sr, had served as United States ambassador to the Ottoman Empire during the First World War. She attended the Walden School and Radcliffe College, graduating in 1933 with a degree in history and literature, then worked as a research assistant for the Institute of Pacific Relations. In 1937 she travelled to Madrid as a correspondent for The Nation, filing dispatches from a city under siege during the Spanish Civil War. She married the physician Lester R. Tuchman in 1940 and spent the war years writing for the Office of War Information, later raising three daughters while working largely outside any university or academic post. Her first book, Bible and Sword, appeared in 1956, followed by The Zimmermann Telegram in 1958, but it was The Guns of August, published in 1962 and awarded the Pulitzer Prize the following year, that made her one of the most widely read historians in America. She followed it with The Proud Tower in 1966, Stilwell and the American Experience in China in 1971, which won her a second Pulitzer, A Distant Mirror in 1978, The March of Folly in 1984, and The First Salute in 1988. In 1979 she became the first woman elected president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Trained nowhere but in libraries and archives, she wrote history as narrative, insisting that the past could be as vivid and exact as any novel. She died on February 6, 1989, in Greenwich, Connecticut, at seventy-seven.