Gordon S. Wood

Gordon S. Wood (born 1933) is Alva O. Way University Professor and Professor of History at Brown University and the recipient of the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for History for The Radicalism of the American Revolution. His book The Creation of the American Republic, 1776—1787 won a 1970 Bancroft Prize.

Wood was born in Concord, Massachusetts and grew up in Worcester and Waltham. He received his B.A. from Tufts University in 1955 and has since served as a trustee there. After serving in the U.S. Air Force in Japan, he entered the Ph.D. program in history at Harvard University. He studied under Bernard Bailyn and receieved his Ph.D. in 1964. He taught briefly at Harvard, William and Mary, and the University of Michigan, before joining the Brown faculty in 1969. He was also Pitt Professor at Cambridge University in 1982-83. In addition to his four books, listed below, he has written a number of influential articles, notably "Rhetoric and Reality in the American Revolution" (1966), "Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style: Causality and Deceit in the Eighteenth Century" (1982), and "Interests and Disinterestness in the Making of the Constitution" (1987). He is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books and The New Republic. His current project is the 1789-1815 volume in The Oxford History of the United States.

He is married to Louise Wood and has three children, Christopher, Elizabeth and Amy. His son, Christopher Wood, is a professor of art history at Yale University.

Two interesting incidents of name-dropping in the 1990s increased Wood's name recognition among the general public. Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich publicly and effusively praised Wood's The Radicalism of the American Revolution, which led to adverse reactions from some liberals in academia and was jokingly described by Wood as "the kiss of death." Wood was also prominently mentioned in the movie Good Will Hunting. The exchange between Matt Damon's character and an obnoxious Harvard grad student seems to have been based mainly on an obscure 1994 New York Review of Books article by Wood that discussed James T. Lemon's writings and on a subsequent letter to the editor by Lemon rather than on Creation or Radicalism.

Partial bibliography

• Wood, Gordon S. (2002). The American Revolution: A History. Modern Library. ISBN 0679640576.
• —. (2004). The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin. Penguin. ISBN 1-59420-019-X.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
• —. (1969). The Creation of the American Republic, 1776—1787. U of North Carolina Press. ISBN 0807847232.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
• —. (1991). The Radicalism of the American Revolution. Vintage-Random. ISBN 0-679-73688-3.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)

External links

• Faculty Webpage
• Transcript of interview with Wood by Brian Lamb on C-SPAN's Booknotes

Wood, Gordon S.