The former president appointed the twenty-seven-year-old Ambrose to edit his papers. Ike coincidentally admired Halleck and the book sparked the general’s attention. Eisenhower, supreme allied commander in World War II and thirty-fourth president of the United States. It was this book on Halleck that led Ambrose to the man with whom he is most closely identified in the public mind: General Dwight D. After visiting during a spring vacation, “I just fell in love with this old bag of bones of a city,” Ambrose has said of New Orleans.Īs a young historian, Ambrose set out to write his second biography about a relatively obscure military figure, Henry Wager Halleck, a Civil War general and Lincoln’s military chief of staff. Ambrose, sixty-two, argues students and adults still want to know “Who were our leaders? What did they do and how did they do it? What were their strengths and weaknesses, their goals and value structures, their adventures and misadventures?”ĭuring three decades as a historian and a writer, Ambrose has practiced this approach in producing nineteen books while also teaching in New Orleans.
Ambrose thinks much is lost when academic historians concentrate on social history, movement history, organizational history, or class or race history.
Now retired, Ambrose taught history for thirty years at the University of New Orleans after graduating from the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
The reason biography is the most popular form of nonfiction writing is that nothing is more fascinating to people than people,” Ambrose says. History is about people, what they have done and why, with what effect. Ambrose shapes our national memory of great leaders and the important events of our time.Īt the core of Ambrose’s phenomenal success in awakening the historical curiosity of the reading public is his simple but straightforward belief that history is more interesting than almost anything because “history is biography. As one of America’s leading biographers and historians, Stephen E.
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