Barbara W. Tuchman

Barbara W. Tuchman (1912–1989) was a self-trained historian and author who achieved prominence with The Zimmerman Telegram and international fame with The Guns of August, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1963. She received her B.A. from Radcliffe College in 1933 and worked as a research assistant at the Institute of Pacific Relations in New York and Tokyo from 1934 to 1935. She then began working as a journalist and contributed to publications including the Nation, for which she covered the Spanish Civil War as a foreign correspondent in 1937. Before her death in 1989, she authored several other books, including The Proud Tower, A Distant Mirror, Practicing History, The March of Folly, The First Salute, and Stilwell and the American Experience in China: 1911–45, also awarded the Pulitzer Prize. In 1980 the National Endowment for the Humanities selected Tuchman to deliver the Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. federal government's highest honor for intellectual achievement in the humanities.