Rick Atkinson to Write New Series on the American Revolution
Rick Atkinson, author of the best-selling Liberation Trilogy about the liberation of Europe in World War II, will write a new trilogy about the American Revolution, it was announced today by Stephen Rubin, president and publisher of Henry Holt and Company, Atkinson’s publisher. Atkinson, a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize and former staff writer and editor at The Washington Post, is the author of the bestsellers An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa, 1942-1943 (winner of the Pulitzer Prize for history), The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944, and the current New York Times no.1 bestseller The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945. The first volume of the new trilogy will tell the story of the beginning of the Revolution in 1775 and 1776; subsequent volumes will cover the years 1777 to 1779 and 1780 to 1781. The trilogy was acquired and will be edited by John Sterling, editor at large for Macmillan; Sterling has edited all six of Atkinson’s books.
Atkinson calls the Revolution America’s Aeneid—a creation story that accounts for who we are as a country, where we came from as a people, and what we believe in as a nation. He will again employ his exhaustive research techniques and acclaimed storytelling ability to show how the Revolution not only begat a nation, but also gave birth to the singular American temperament of aspiration and idealism. These traits persist today, nearly two and a half centuries later.
“As he proved in his magisterial history of Europe’s liberation in World War II, Rick Atkinson is America’s preeminent military historian, and with this new trilogy he will once again tell an apparently familiar story in an utterly fresh way,” said Sterling. “We are proud and delighted to be continuing our longtime publishing partnership with Rick.”
“The greatest events in U.S. history are bottomless,” said Atkinson. “I aim to do for the American Revolution what I set out to do for the Mediterranean and European theaters in World War II: to write a grand narrative, an epic that weaves together tactical combat scenes that march the reader into battle with strategic storytelling that illuminates the reasoning and anxieties of those making the decisions that shaped both a new nation and Western civilization.”
Atkinson, who spent nearly fifteen years working on his World War II trilogy, was a staff writer and senior editor at The Washington Post for 25 years. He is the author of The Long Gray Line, Crusade, In the Company of Soldiers, and the best-selling Liberation Trilogy, An Army at Dawn, The Day of Battle, and The Guns at Last Light. A two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize—one for his journalism, another for his work as a historian—he has also won many other awards, including the George Polk Award and the Pritzker Military Library Literature Award. He lives in Washington, D.C.
Sterling acquired world rights to the trilogy from Raphael Sagalyn of ICM/Sagalyn Agency in Washington, D.C.
About Macmillan
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