She did not have a Ph.D. “It’s what saved me, I think,” she said.

From The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman. I read most her books in my early twenties. I have loaded several of them on my Kobo to read in snatches when waiting for a plane, on hold on the phone, monitoring a low-impact conference call.

I had forgotten just how fresh is her writing style. I am going to enjoy revisiting these books.

From the Preface.

Her relations with academics, critics, and reviewers were wary. She did not have a Ph.D. “It’s what saved me, I think,” she said, believing that the requirements of conventional academic life can stultify imagination, stifle enthusiasm and deaden prose style. “The academic historian,” she said, “suffers from having a captive audience, first in the supervisor of his dissertation, then in the lecture hall. Keeping the reader turning the page has not been his primary concern.” Someone suggested that she might enjoy teaching. “Why should I teach?,” she responded vigorously. “I am a writer! I don’t want to teach! I couldn’t teach if I tried!” For her, a writer’s place was in the library or the field doing research, or at the desk, writing. Herodotus, Thucydides, Gibbon, MacCauley, and Parkman, she noted, did not have Ph.D.s.

Mrs. Tuchman was stung when reviewers, especially academic reviewers, sniffed that her work was “popular history,” implying that because it sold a great many copies, it failed to meet their own exacting standards. She routinely ignored the policy most writers observe of never responding to negative reviews, because to do so simply provokes the reviewer and opens further avenues of harm. She fired right back. “I have noticed,” she wrote to The New York Times, “that reviewers who are in a great hurry to complain of an author’s failure to include this or that have usually themselves failed to read the text under review.” And again: “Nonfiction authors understand that reviewers must find some error to expose in order to show their own erudition and we wait especially to know what it will be.” Eventually, most academics were won over—or, at least, backed away from confrontation. Over the years, she gave addresses at, and collected degrees from, many of the greatest universities in the land, won two Pulitzer Prizes, and became the first woman elected president of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in its eighty-year existence.