Gordon S. Wood (born November 27, 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 graduated summa cum laude from Tufts University in 1955 and has since served as a trustee there. After serving in the U.S. Air Force in Japan (during which time he earned an A.M. at Harvard University), he entered the Ph.D. program in history at Harvard, where he studied under Bernard Bailyn. Receiving his Ph.D. in 1964, he taught briefly at Harvard, the College of William and Mary, and the University of Michigan, before joining the faculty at Brown in 1969. He was also Pitt Professor at Cambridge University in 1982-83 and has lectured for One Day University. In addition to his 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 Disinterestedness in the Making of the Constitution" (1987). He is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books and The New Republic. His most recent project, the 1789-1815 volume in the Oxford History of the United States series entitled Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815, was published in October 2009.
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 and his daughter, Amy Wood, is a professor of history at Illinois State 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 in an interview on C-SPAN in 2002 as "the kiss of death." [1]
Wood was also prominently mentioned in the movie Good Will Hunting. The exchange between Matt Damon's character and an obnoxious Harvard graduate 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 Wood's more well-known writings.
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