David McCullough, the beloved American biographer and historian who died in 2022, provides one more dispatch in History Matters, a posthumous collection edited by his daughter Dorie McCullough Lawson and his research assistant Michael Hill. The essays, interviews, and speeches--many previously unpublished--reveal McCullough's influences, writing habits, and overriding passion for the past as a guidepost to the present. Though slim in page count, the book's pieces are grand in sentiment and elocution, as only McCullough could make them. In "The Art of Biography," an interview with the Paris Review that McCullough was "particularly proud of," readers learn of his early childhood in Pittsburgh, how he chose his subjects, and even what happened to his proposed biography of Pablo Picasso: "I quit. I didn't like him."
Other entries revisit his most cherished subjects, including Harry Truman, whom McCullough deeply admired because "he put character first." Other selections reflect on artist Thomas Eakins, abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe, and George Washington, a "truly indispensable" man who "was at his best when things were at their worst." McCullough's perceptive literary insights in tributes to writers such as Paul Horgan and Herman Wouk are compelling, and in "The Good, Hard Work of Writing Well," he encourages aspiring writers to "make music. Don't just pound out notes." Throughout, McCullough's inimitable voice reminds readers that "history should not ever be dull." In the pages of History Matters, McCullough's fans will lose themselves in one more missive that is anything but. --Peggy Kurkowski, book reviewer in Denver