Background
Charles Bruce Catton was born on October 9, 1899 in Petoskey, Michigan, United States. He was the son of George R. Catton, a Congregational minister and teacher, and Adella M. Patten.
Charles Bruce Catton was born on October 9, 1899 in Petoskey, Michigan, United States. He was the son of George R. Catton, a Congregational minister and teacher, and Adella M. Patten.
He graduated from Benzonia Academy, a preparatory school presided over by his father, Catton entered Oberlin College in 1916.
On America's entrance into World War I, he enlisted in the United States Navy as a gunner's mate, returning to college after the armistice. At the end of his junior year, he left Oberlin for good to become a newspaperman, breaking with the family tradition of entering the ministry or teaching. From 1920 to 1926 he reported variously for the Cleveland News, the Boston American, and the Cleveland Plain Dealer. From 1926 to 1941, Catton wrote for the Newspaper Enterprise Association, moving through a series of specialized roles as a feature assignment reporter, editorial writer, book reviewer, and syndicated columnist based in Washington, D. C. During World War II he served as director of information for the War Production Board and, after the war, in the same capacity for the Department of the Interior. He was a special assistant to the secretary of commerce in 1948, the year he published The War Lords of Washington, a firsthand account of the bickering, backbiting, and intrigue that marked the struggle for power between high-level civilian officials and the military during World War II. The book received mixed reviews and was little read, but its reception was encouraging enough for him to strike out on his own as a free-lance writer. His subject was the Civil War, which had long been the focus of his recreational reading and a source of fascination since his boyhood in Benzonia, where he had heard countless war stories from the town's aging veterans of the Grand Army of the Republic. Their recollections were so vivid, he wrote, that he felt "the whole affair had taken place in the next county just a few years ago. " Over time he had collected and avidly read regimental histories, soldiers' diaries, and little-known memoirs, most of which, he believed, had been overlooked by other Civil War historians. He initially thought to write a novel, a literary form he had earlier tackled with little success (his two efforts in the 1930's, he told an interviewer, were "quite worthless"), but he soon abandoned fiction for straight narrative history. In 1951 he offered Mr. Lincoln's Army to three publishing houses before Doubleday agreed to take it. The first volume in a trilogy about the Army of the Potomac, it was followed by Glory Road in 1952 and A Stillness at Appomattox in 1953. The last volume won Catton a large and faithful audience and established his reputation as an elegant writer of narrative history, with a unique ability to recreate the life of common soldiers as well as the mood of the era he described. In 1954, Catton became the first editor of American Heritage, a magazine of popular history that quickly became a publishing success. By 1959, the demands on his time as a writer and lecturer became so great that he relinquished editorial control of the magazine to become senior editor, a position he held until his death. Between 1950 and 1978, he published fourteen books relating to the Civil War. In addition to his trilogy on the Army of the Potomac, he wrote The Coming Fury (1961), Terrible Swift Sword (1963), and Never Call Retreat (1965), which collectively formed The Centennial History of the Civil War. Less successful with academic critics were three volumes that moved away from Catton's familiar narrative territory to speculations about the causes and consequences of the war. His critics accused him of reductionism, unsubstantiated generalizations, and overblown prose in U. S. Grant and the American Military Tradition (1954), a preliminary examination of Grant's place in American history; This Hallowed Ground (1956), an assessment of the meaning of the Union's victory; and America Goes to War (1958), a series of essays on the war's military legacy derived from the lectures he delivered as Frank B. Weeks Visiting Professor of History at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut Returning to the narrative form, Catton gained critical favor for Grant Moves South (1960) and Grant Takes Command (1969), which completed the three-volume biography begun by Lloyd Lewis, who had died shortly after he completed the first volume, Captain Sam Grant, in 1950. In addition, Catton wrote the narrative for The American Heritage Picture History of the Civil War, which won him and Stephen Sears, the picture editor, a special Pulitzer citation in 1961. In his later years, he published a memoir, Waiting for the Morning Train (1972); a battle history, Gettysburg: The Final Fury (1974); and a volume in the State and Nation Series, Michigan: A Bicentennial History (1976). He twice collaborated with his son, William, a professor of American history at Middlebury College in Vermont: in 1963 on Two Roads to Sumter and in 1978 on The Bold and Magnificent Dream: America's Founding Years, 1492-1815. Catton was a highly disciplined and well-organized writer who rose early and worked late. An avid fisherman and baseball fan, he was fond of good food and drink. For many years the Algonquin Hotel in New York City kept a corner table for him at lunch. Although he could be a blunt-spoken critic in editorial sessions, he was, said an associate, "a positive pussycat" in his face-to-face meetings with writers whose work he had to reject. He died in Frankfort.
Tall and unassuming, he had, a colleague wrote, "the faintly courtly good manners of the old Midwest. "
On August 16, 1925, he married Hazel H. Cherry; they had one child.