John a garraty biography of williams

OBITUARY NOTICE—

See index for CA sketch: Born July 4, 1920, in Brooklyn, NY; died of heart failure, December 19, 2007, in Sag Harbor, NY. Educator, historian, biographer, editor, and author.

Garraty spent his career focused on the lives of others. During the decades that he taught at Columbia University, lastly as the Gouverneur Morris Professor of History, he wrote or edited dozens of books. Some were histories of the United States; many were biographies of the American men and women who made history, for better or worse.

Garraty was best known as the general editor of the massive American National Biography (1999), a work of such scope that its index of representative occupations alone runs to 200 pages. Garraty had edited several supplements to the predecessor, the Dictionary of American Biography (1974-88) when he realized that the original work had become so dated, unwieldy, unbalanced, and even inaccurate in light of n