She had strong features, a high forehead, wise hazel eyes and a somewhat serious manner that gave way, now and then, to a dazzling smile. In her person as well as in her choice of words, Mrs. ''This is accomplished only when the narrative moves steadily ahead, not when it comes to a weary standstill, overloaded with every item uncovered in the research.'' An Impression of Authority ''I want the reader to turn the page and keep on turning to the end,'' she added. In history and biography, she told an audience at the National Portrait Gallery in 1978, ''the writer's object is - or should be - to hold the reader's attention.'' Tuchman had a firm, even contentious, sense of her vocation. But if you're an ordinary female housewife, people say, 'This is just something Barbara wanted to do it's not professional.' '' ''If a man is a writer,'' she once said, ''everybody tiptoes around past the locked door of the breadwinner.
''If I had taken a doctoral degree, it would have stifled any writing capacity.'' Her Primary Obstacleīut to be a writer was difficult, she found, simply because she was a woman. She had neither an academic title nor even a graduate degree. But as her three daughters grew older, she took up the historian's profession. Tuchman could have had an easy, conventional life as the wife of a prominent physician. 9.īorn into a New York family that had long been eminent in finance and public service, Mrs. It has been on the New York Times best-seller list for 17 weeks, and last week was No. Her most recent book, ''The First Salute,'' sets the American Revolution in international perspective. Her other books included ''The Zimmermann Telegram,'' ''The Proud Tower'' and ''A Distant Mirror.'' Latest Book a Best Seller Stilwell, a hard-driving American officer who played a major role in China during World War II, was combined with a history of modern China. The second Pulitzer came for ''Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911-45.'' The 1971 biography of Gen.
Tuchman's fourth book, ''The Guns of August,'' a study of the background and beginning of World War I, that made her a celebrity after it came out in 1962, winning reviewers' salutes, a durable niche on best-seller lists and her first Pulitzer Prize. She was 77 years old and was admitted to the hospital Saturday after suffering the stroke at her home at Cos Cob, Conn. Tuchman, whose skill at writing histories of men at war and on the brink of war won her two Pulitzer Prizes, died of complications of a stroke yesterday afternoon at Greenwich (Conn.) Hospital.
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