The Costco Connection

By J. Rentilly

FIVE YEARS AGO, David McCullough surrendered to his publisher the manuscript for his 10th book, The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris, a sweeping and intimate account of 19th-century expats inspired to great innovation and notable exploits while living in the City of Light. Like virtually all of the preeminent, best-selling historian’s books, Journey was a critical and commercial tour de force.

There was only one problem: McCullough, previously honored with two Pulitzer Prizes, two National Book Awards and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, had no idea what his next opus might be. Compulsively drawn to undervalued historical figures, heroes in “constant trouble,” self-made individuals capable, with creativity, character, and hard work, of redrafting themselves to answer oft-quixotic callings, McCullough held steadfast in his faith that American history would answer his request for another dynamic tale as yet untold.

“That’s when I came across this marvel-
ous letter from [Pulitzer Prize–winning nov-
elist] Edith Wharton, where she describes
getting out of her car in Paris, just outside her
hotel, looking up toward the sky and seeing
an airplane flying overhead,” McCullough
says in a baritone both omnipotent and ten-
der, familiar to viewers of his long-running
PBS series, American Experience.

That image held McCullough in its sway. And with that, he was hot on the trail of Orville and Wilbur Wright, the aviation pioneers whose fixed-wing flying machines changed what was known about aeronautics and achieved what was thought to be impossible: manned, powered flight in a heavier-than-air machine.

The 81-year-old’s 336-page new book, The Wright Brothers, is the result of tireless pavement pounding, exhaustive research, hundreds of interviews, what he calls “considerable thinking” and a final edit conducted in collaboration with Rosalee, his wife of

61 years. Rosalee reads
aloud his every draft,
while he makes necessary
adjustments. “It’s a criti-
cal part of the process for
me,” McCullough says
adoringly. “And she’s the
best dancer I ever danced with.”
To discover “the story of people becom-
ing,” a McCullough trademark, the author
spent weeks at the Library of Congress por-
ing over a trove of letters, photographs and
documents untouched for nearly a hundred
years, and visited the brothers’ former stomp-
ing grounds, gathering “ 20 times or more”
material than he ever could use. “You have to
have a good, big haul of iron ore so you can
make the steel,” says the Pittsburgh native
and Yale graduate. “You have to bring it in by
the trainload.”
Having previously chronicled the con-
struction of the Brooklyn Bridge, as well as
the lives of Harry S. Truman and John Adams,
McCullough discovered quickly that the
Wrights were “incapable of being dull,” that
their little-known sister, Katharine, was
“absolutely critical to their successes” and that
their story not only formed a narrative he
found personally gripping and inspiring, but
also modeled character traits he hopes are
useful to younger generations.

“These brothers grew up without running water, with no indoor plumbing, no telephone, none of the comforts we consider essential today,” he says.

Additionally, “they resisted the tempta-
tion to say that they’d transcended some
grave adversities to accomplish what they
did, to bad-mouth their rivals [or] to be vic-
tims or heroes,” McCullough says. “They
believed they had everything they needed—
books and curiosity and love—and then they
simply did what they did. I’m hopeful that
we’ll start seeing more Americans like that
one day soon.”
With The Wright Brothers poised for
takeoff, McCullough is unsure what “thrill of
discovery” comes next or how that tale will
begin. Asked how he might commence the
telling of his own life’s journey, McCullough
skips not a beat.

“Well, that’s very easy,” he says, suddenly radiant. “Rosalee walks into a dance in Pittsburgh the spring after we’d both just graduated from high school, and for some reason I’ll never know, she looks at me. How’s that for a beginning?” C