[1] Known as a narrative historian, Catton specialized in popular history, featuring interesting characters and historical vignettes, in addition to the basic facts, dates, and analyses.

I think I was always subconsciously driven by an attempt to restate that faith and to show where it was properly grounded, how it grew out of what a great many young men on both sides felt and believed and were brave enough to do.

From 1926 to 1941, he worked for the Newspaper Enterprise Association, a Scripps-Howard syndicate), for which he wrote editorials and book reviews, as well as serving as a Washington, D.C.

In the first issue, he wrote: We intend to deal with that great, unfinished and illogically inspiring story of the American people doing, being and becoming.

For his final volume of the trilogy, A Stillness at Appomattox (1953), Catton recounted the campaigns of Ulysses S. Grant in Virginia from 1864 to the end of the war during 1865.

It was his first commercially successful work and it won both the Pulitzer Prize for History[2] and a National Book Award for Nonfiction.

For the first volume, The Coming Fury (1961), Catton discussed the causes of the war, culminating in its first major combat operation, the First Battle of Bull Run.

For the third volume, Never Call Retreat (1965), the war continued through the battles of Vicksburg and Gettysburg, and the bloody struggles of 1864 and 1865 before the final surrender.

In Two Roads to Sumter (1963), written with his son William, Catton recounted the 15 years prior to the war, as considered from the points of view of the two main politicians involved in the conflict: Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis.

Toward the end of his life, Catton published Michigan: A Bicentennial History (1976) and The Bold & Magnificent Dream: America's Founding Years, 1492–1815 (1978).

There is a near-magic power of imagination in Catton’s work [that] almost seemed to project him physically onto the battlefields, along the dusty roads and to the campfires of another age.

[16] During 1977, the year before his death, Catton received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's greatest civilian honor, from President Gerald R. Ford, who noted that the author and historian "made us hear the sounds of battle and cherish peace."

There is a near-magic power of imagination in Catton's work that seemed to project him physically into the battlefields, along the dusty roads and to the campfires of another age.

The prize was awarded to Dumas Malone (1984), C. Vann Woodward (1986), Richard B. Morris (1988), Henry Steele Commager (1990), Edmund S. Morgan (1992), John Hope Franklin (1994), Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. (1996), Richard N. Current (1998), Bernard Bailyn (2000), Gerda Lerner (2002), David Brion Davis (2004), and David Herbert Donald (2006).

[18] Note: These two volumes are sequels to historian Lloyd Lewis's posthumously published Captain Sam Grant (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1950.)