by David McCullough
Growing up in Pittsburgh, I went to a wonderful public school where the arts were given as much attention as standard subjects like math and history. We had art and music every day. We were taken to museums and steel mills. I had excellent teachers, both in grade school and high school. Most of us are lucky if we have two or three teachers who change our lives and I had several, especially Vincent Scully, who taught art and architecture at Yale. He taught us to see, to think about spaces, to pay attention to what the buildings were saying, and to think about what the alternatives were, what might have been built that wasn't. And few men I've known have such a great understanding of America. I also took Daily Themes at Yale, Robert Penn Warren's writing course. Every morning at eight-thirty you had to slide a sheet of original prose under the professor's door, and if you didn't, you got a zero. There was no kidding about it. It taught us discipline, to produce.
David McCullough is the award-winning author of many books, including The Wright Brothers.
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