The Greater Journey by David McCullough

Set in the 1830’s, David McCullough’s The Greater Journey talks about the voyages of artists and medical field professionals to Paris in order to learn more about their jobs. The importance of Paris is very important to these people because people were still in slavery and people wanted to be free. These people want to learn France’s ways of success and apply that knowledge to America to grow as a nation. The book contains 15 biographies, each one telling the story of a different individual and their journey.

Each story lets the audience know about these individuals’ risks of crossing over the Atlantic and leaving their home in order to experience France’s unique culture. They learn about the opportunities that Europe had in art and medicine. From this knowledge, these journeyers knew they did the right thing to travel to Paris for America’s sake as well as their own as they all became successful in their careers. Without these people, it would not have shaped American history.

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McCullough does a good job of putting Paris into the main focus of this book because it helps emphasize his claim that Europe and France were important to American history. However, he spends a big portion of his book talking about his characters’ physical appearance. This information is not necessary to understand the story’s plot, but rather, it loses his audience’s focus. McCullough’s details of his characters’ physical appearance is boring out his audience because they are very long and full descriptions.

It has very little importance on his characters’ achievements and experiences in Paris, which actually makes his readers actually wanting to reading his book. For example, on page 50, McCullough describes one of his journeyers Emma Hart Willard: “her figure is small, but rounded to the very last degree of perfection; not a muscle swelled beyond the exquisite outline; not an angle, not a fault…. Her face is most strangely interesting, not quite beautiful, but of that half-appealing, half retiring sweetness.”

Another example is on page 68, McCullough explains how Samuel Morse has his, “forehead is high, his eyes are black, his nose is straight, his mouth is large, his chin is regular, his hair is black and grey, and his face is long.” The audience would find this to be quite boring in a way because most people want to know about the way he acts rather than his full physical appearance. A good way to bring the audience into the book way saying what they did was important for example Samuel Morse started out as an artist, but he started as a portrait painter. He wanted to paint scenes of historic importance. McCullough explains really well about how hard Samuel Morse worked and why he wanted to have a career in painting. When he returned to America, he accepted a job as a professor of art at New York University. For example, on page 85 McCullough says “Greatest of all was the standing acclaim when the new American minister to France, John Y. Mason, announced that the governments of Europe, with France in their lead, had agreed to honor Professor Morse as a benefactor of mankind. He was to be awarded the sum of 400,000 francs, with France contributing the largest part of it.” These explanations of what they were doing really brought the audience back into the book and McCullough did a really good job of that.

This book is definitely a great book about Americans bringing new ideas back home to change history for the greater good. This book would definitely be good for people who love what happened back in the day and how America got to be where it is. Paris was a big thing to go through in the 1830’s. This shows how important these travelers thought it would be to go to Paris. This would be that all the Americans would bring home all of their professional skills, new ideas, and new ways of looking at things.