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Barbara Tuchman Biography

Historian

Name at birth: Barbara Wertheim

Barbara Tuchman covered the Spanish Civil War for the U.S. magazine The Nation in the 1930s. She won a Pulitzer Prize in 1963 for her history of the beginnings of World War I, The Guns of August, and another Pulitzer in 1972 for Stilwell and the American Experience in China: 1911-45. Although Tuchman was not an academically trained historian, she wrote many history books that appealed to a wide audience, including The Proud Tower (1966), A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century (1978) and The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam (1984).

Extra credit: She is also the author of a book on the famous World War I telegram from German diplomat Arthur Zimmermann.

Other historians: Henry Adams, Howard Zinn and Plutarch.