In his memoir, L.L.Bean: The Making of an American Icon, Gorman tells of how, before he became president, he carried a little black notebook with him at all times in which he jotted down notes for how to improve the operation, eventually compiling more than four hundred specific ideas. Upon becoming president, he began to implement the list. Under Gorman, L.L.Bean increased revenues by more than forty times in inflation-adjusted dollars. If that’s shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations, then they must be very nice shirtsleeves indeed.

The following out-of-work period was difficult but gave him [DeVore] some real exercise in a new kind of resonance:

The unsuccessful job-hunting became very frustrating, and I became very depressed. So much so that I made myself susceptible to a virus that resulted in spinal meningitis. And I was laid down flat in bed for three months with no income coming in. Nothing coming in at all and a wife who was pregnant, mortgage payments that were overdue, and every time I started to stand up my head just throbbed and I couldn’t do anything. All I could do was read. And so I had my wife go to the library.

I said, “Get me every book you can on every great person, every person who has been successful.” In these three months I devoured about twenty-five autobiographies and biographies of great people. And every time I read these biographies or autobiographies I identified with these people. These people became models.

It took her “six or seven years of very interrupted effort” to produce Bible and Sword. Like Morrison, Tuchman accumulated a stack of rejection slips before finding a publisher, a university press that mainly produced niche books. At age 44, Tuchman had finally become a published writer of history— a relatively unknown writer with a small readership, but a published writer nonetheless. And like Morrison, she’d become compulsive about her work, unable to stop herself, one question leading to another, project after project, book after book.

Yet both sustained the cycle of creative work, Morrison pumping out five major books after receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature (at age 62) and Tuchman producing four major books after the second Pulitzer Prize. Both writers produced more than 40% of their major books after the age of 60.

As Tuchman herself wrote in the final paragraph of The Guns of August, “The Battle of the Marne was one of the decisive battles of the world not because it determined that Germany would ultimately lose or the Allies would ultimately win the war but because it determined that the war would go on. . . . Afterward there was no turning back. The nations were caught in a trap, a trap made during the first thirty days out of battles that failed to be decisive, a trap from which there was, and has been, no exit.”

President Kennedy Kept Returning to the lessons of Tuchman’s book as he navigated the missile crisis. His brother Robert Kennedy later wrote in Thirteen Days, “Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August had made a great impression on the president. ‘I am not going to follow a course which will allow anyone to write a comparable book about this time, The Missiles of October,’ he said to me that Saturday night, October 26. ‘If anybody is around to write after this, they are going to understand that we made every effort to find peace and every effort to give our adversary room to move.’” Kennedy went for the naval blockade rather than an all-out invasion of Cuba.