65 Book Recommendations From David McCullough
History Matters, a collection of David McCullough's speeches and writings published by his daughter, is filled with his book recommendations. The last few chapters are specifically dedicated to the books that influenced McCullough the most, but such recommendations are scattered throughout the entire book in his various speeches. So I went through the book and collected a list of all of the books McCullough mentioned or recommended in order to compile a complete list of his recommendations.
Enjoy, and happy reading.
Fiction
| Title | Author |
|---|---|
| Advice and Consent | Allen Drury |
| All the King’s Men | Robert Penn Warren |
| Angle of Repose | Wallace Stegner |
| Ben and Me | Robert Lawson |
| Burr | Gore Vidal |
| The Caine Mutiny | Herman Wouk |
| The Captain | Jan de Hartog |
| A Death in the Family | James Agee |
| Democracy | Henry Adams |
| A Distant Trumpet | Paul Horgan |
| The Expedition of Humphry Clinker | Tobias Smollett |
| Far From Cibola | Paul Horgan |
| Fathers and Sons | Ivan Turgenev |
| The Fault of Angels | Paul Horgan |
| The Fields | Conrad Richter |
| The Gay Place | Billy Lee Brammer |
| The Killer Angels | Michael Shaara |
| My Ántonia | Willa Cather |
| No Quarter Given | Paul Horgan |
| Paddle-to-the-Sea | Holling C. Holling |
| The Pilgrim’s Progress | John Bunyan |
| The Sea of Grass | Conrad Richter |
| A Small Town in Germany | John le Carré |
| A Tale of Two Cities | Charles Dickens |
| The Tenants of Time | Thomas Flanagan |
| Tender Is the Night | F. Scott Fitzgerald |
| The Thin Mountain Air | Paul Horgan |
| Things As They Are | Paul Horgan |
| The Town | Conrad Richter |
| A Tree Grows in Brooklyn | Betty Smith |
| The Trees | Conrad Richter |
| War and Remembrance | Herman Wouk |
| The Warden | Anthony Trollope |
| The Winds of War | Herman Wouk |
| The Young Lions | Irwin Shaw |
Non-fiction
| Title | Author |
|---|---|
| American Caesar | William Manchester |
| Angela’s Ashes | Frank McCourt |
| Aspects of the Novel | E.M. Forster |
| The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table | Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. |
| The Education of Henry Adams | Henry Adams |
| Familiar Quotations | John Bartlett |
| Great River | Paul Horgan |
| Lamy of Santa Fe | Paul Horgan |
| Life of a Little-Known Planet | Howard Ensign Evans |
| The Life of Samuel Johnson | James Boswell |
| Melbourne | David Cecil |
| A Night to Remember | Walter Lord |
| Of America East & West | Paul Horgan |
| Only Yesterday | Frederick Lewis Allen |
| A Political Education | Harry McPherson |
| The Proud Tower | Barbara Tuchman |
| The Reason Why | Cecil Woodham-Smith |
| Reveille in Washington | Margaret Leech |
| Ricordi | Francesco Guicciardini |
| The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich | William Shirer |
| The Road from Coorain | Jill Ker Conway |
| Silent Spring | Rachel Carson |
| A Stillness at Appomattox | Bruce Catton |
| The Summing Up | W. Somerset Maugham |
| Thomas Eakins: The Heroism of Modern Life | Elizabeth Johns |
| Tolstoy | Henri Troyat |
| Two Years Before the Mast | Richard Henry Dana |
| Wind, Sand and Stars | Antoine de Saint-Exupéry |
| Writers at Work | The Paris Review |
| The Years of Lyndon Johnson | Robert Caro |