Winner of the 2000 Richard Nelson Current Award of Achievement, awarded
annually by the Lincoln Forum.
He won his first Pulitzer Prize for biography in 1961, for "Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War". In 1988, he won his second Pulitzer for "Look Homeward: A Life of Thomas Wolfe".
He taught at Columbia, Smith, Princeton, Johns Hopkins, and Harvard.
He earned his bachelor's degree at Millsaps College in Mississippi; a master's degree in history at the University of Illinois; and a doctorate for which he studied with eminent Civil War scholar James G. Randall.
He was an eminent Lincoln scholar and Civil War historian. He wrote several books on the Civil War and historic figures of that period.