Barbara W. Tuchman (1912–1989)

Writies about : Middle Ages, Renaissance, 1900. Barbara Wertheim was born into a New York family that was prominent in finance and public service. She was a first cousin of Manhattan District Attorney Robert M. Morgenthau, a niece of Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, Jr., and a granddaughter of Henry Morgenthau Sr., who served as ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. She graduated from Radcliffe College. In 1939, she married Lester R. Tuchman, a physician, researcher and professor of medicine at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York; they had three daughters.
From 1934-1935, Barbara Tuchman worked as a research assistant at the Institute of Pacific Relations in New York and Tokyo, and then began a career in journalism. She was the editorial assistant for The Nation and a U.S. correspondent for the New Statesman in London, the Far East News Desk, and the Office of War Information in World War II.
After Ms. Tuchman turned to writing histories, her fourth book, The Guns of August (1962) became a bestseller and made her a celebrity, in addition to winning her the first of two Pulitzer Prizes (the second was in 1972). Ms. Tuchman was named the first woman president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1979, and received the National Book Award in 1980. She became a trustee of Radcliffe College and worked as a lecturer at Harvard University, the University of California, and the U.S. Naval War College. Her daughter Jessica Tuchman Mathews is the president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

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