Historian David McCullough is known for his biographies of monumental American figures: John Adams, Theodore Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman. But McCullough second book, published in 1972, explored American history not through the eyes of a Founding Father or a President, but through one of the most important public works projects of all time: the Brooklyn Bridge.

David McCullough tells the untold story of the adventurous American artists, writers, doctors, politicians, architects, and thinkers who set off to work in Paris between 1830 and 1900, and how their achievements there profoundly altered American history. The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris tells the stories of these pioneers, including Elizabeth Blackwell, the first female doctor in America; James Fenimore Cooper and Samuel F. B. Morse; pianist Louis Moreau Gottschalk; Oliver Wendell Holmes; writers Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mark Twain, and Henry James; and painters Mary Cassatt and John Singer Sargent, among others.