He graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Tufts University in 1955 and has served as a trustee there.

In addition to his books (listed below), Wood has written numerous influential articles, notably "Rhetoric and Reality in the American Revolution" (1966), "Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style: Causality and Deceit in the Eighteenth Century" (1982), and "Interests and Disinterestedness in the Making of the Constitution" (1987).

[4] Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich publicly and effusively praised Wood's The Radicalism of the American Revolution (1992).

He accuses the Harvard student of shallowly reiterating ideas he has encountered in his coursework, telling him that soon he would be "regurgitating Gordon Wood, talking about [...] the pre-Revolutionary utopia and the capital-forming effects of military mobilization.

"[7] This scene was later parodied by the television show It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, in which the character Charlie Kelly attempts to "pull a Good Will Hunting" and asks "does no one know who Gordon Wood is?"