Happy birthday, Stephen Ambrose

He was born in Decatur, Illinois (1936). He was 28 years old when a small university press published his first book, Halleck: Lincoln’s Chief of Staff (1962), a biography of General Henry Halleck. Only a few thousand copies of the biography were printed, and Ambrose assumed that it had only been read by the academic community. But one day, he got a phone call from the former president, Dwight Eisenhower, who had read his book on Halleck and liked it so much that he wanted Ambrose to be his own biographer.

Ambrose wrote several books about Eisenhower, including The Supreme Commander (1970) and Eisenhower: The President (1984), and those books helped him leap from academic to popular historian. He went on to write many best-selling books about American history, including Band of Brothers (1992) and D-Day, June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II (1994).

Stephen Ambrose believed that he became a successful historian because he got so much practice telling stories to his students. He said, “There is nothing like standing before 50 students at 8 a.m. to start talking about an event that occurred 100 years ago, because the look on their faces is a challenge — ‘Let’s see you keep me awake.’ You learn what works and what doesn’t in a hurry.”

h/t The Writers Almanac