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The Right Stuff (film)

The Right Stuff is a 1983 American epic historical drama film written and directed by Philip Kaufman and based on the 1979 book of the same name by Tom Wolfe. The film follows the Navy, Marine, and Air Force test pilots who were involved in aeronautical research at Edwards Air Force Base, California, as well as the Mercury Seven, the seven military pilots who were selected to be the astronauts for Project Mercury, the first human spaceflight by the United States. The film stars Sam Shepard, Ed Harris, Scott Glenn, Fred Ward, Dennis Quaid, and Barbara Hershey; Levon Helm narrates and plays Air Force test pilot Jack Ridley.

The Right Stuff was a box-office bomb, grossing about $21 million (domestically) against a $27 million budget. Despite this, it received widespread critical acclaim, and was nominated for eight Oscars at the 56th Academy Awards, four of which it won. The film was a huge success on the home video market. In 2013, it was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". The film was ranked #19 on the American Film Institute's most inspiring movies.

The film was later expanded into its titular franchise, including a television series and a documentary film.

Plot
In 1947, over the Muroc Army Air Field in California, a number of test pilots are killed while flying high-speed aircraft such as the rocket-powered Bell X-1. After another pilot, Slick Goodlin, demands $150,000  to attempt to break the sound barrier, war hero Captain Chuck Yeager receives the chance to fly the X-1. While on a horseback ride with his wife Glennis, Yeager collides with a tree branch and breaks his ribs, which inhibits him from leaning over and locking the door to the X-1. Worried that he might not fly the mission, Yeager confides in friend and fellow pilot Jack Ridley. Ridley cuts off part of a broomstick and tells Yeager to use it as a lever to help seal the hatch to the X-1, and Yeager becomes the first person to fly at supersonic speed, defeating the "demon in the sky".

Six years later, Muroc, now Edwards Air Force Base, still attracts the best test pilots. Yeager (now a major) and friendly rival Scott Crossfield repeatedly break one another's speed records. They often visit the Happy Bottom Riding Club run by Pancho Barnes, who classifies the pilots at Edwards as either "prime" (such as Yeager and Crossfield) that fly the best equipment or newer "pudknockers" who only dream about it. Gordon "Gordo" Cooper, Virgil "Gus" Grissom and Donald "Deke" Slayton, captains of the United States Air Force, are among the "pudknockers" who hope to also prove that they have "the Right Stuff". The tests are no longer secret, as the military soon recognizes that it needs good publicity for funding, and with "no bucks, no Buck Rogers". Cooper's wife, Trudy, and other wives are afraid of becoming widows, but cannot change their husbands' ambitions and desire for success and fame.

In 1957, the launch of the Soviet Sputnik satellite alarms the United States government. Politicians such as Senator Lyndon B. Johnson and military leaders demand that NASA help America defeat the Soviets in the new Space Race. The search for the first Americans in space excludes Yeager because he lacks a college degree. Grueling physical and mental tests select the Mercury Seven astronauts, including John Glenn of the United States Marine Corps, Alan Shepard, Walter Schirra and Scott Carpenter of the United States Navy, as well as Cooper, Grissom and Slayton; they immediately become national heroes. Although many early NASA rockets explode during launch, the ambitious astronauts all hope to be the first in space as part of Project Mercury. Although engineers see the men as passengers, the pilots insist that the Mercury spacecraft have a window, a hatch with explosive bolts, and pitch-yaw-roll controls. However, the Soviet Union beats them into space on April 12, 1961, with the launch of Vostok 1 carrying Yuri Gagarin. The seven astronauts are determined to match and surpass the Soviets.

Shepard is the first American to reach space on the 15-minute sub-orbital flight of Mercury-Redstone 3 on May 5. After Grissom's similar flight of Mercury-Redstone 4 on July 21, the capsule's hatch blows open and quickly fills with water. Grissom escapes, but the spacecraft, overweight with seawater, sinks. Many criticize Grissom for possibly panicking and opening the hatch prematurely. Glenn becomes the first American to orbit the Earth on Mercury-Atlas 6 on February 20, 1962, surviving a possibly loose heat shield, and receives a ticker-tape parade. He, his colleagues, and their families become celebrities, including a gigantic celebration in the Sam Houston Coliseum to announce the opening of the Manned Space Center in Houston, despite Glenn's wife Annie's fear of public speaking due to a stutter.

Although test pilots at Edwards mock the Mercury program for sending "spam in a can" into space, they recognize that they are no longer the fastest men on Earth, and Yeager states that "it takes a special kind of man to volunteer for a suicide mission, especially when it's on national TV." While testing the new Lockheed NF-104A, Yeager attempts to set a new altitude record at the edge of space but is nearly killed in a high-speed ejection when his engine fails. Though seriously burned after reaching the ground, Yeager gathers up his parachute and walks to the ambulance, proving his worth.

On May 15, 1963, Cooper has a successful launch on Mercury-Atlas 9, ending the Mercury program. As the last American to fly into space alone, he "went higher, farther, and faster than any other American ... for a brief moment, Gordo Cooper became the greatest pilot anyone had ever seen."

Cast

 * Sam Shepard as Chuck Yeager, USAF
 * Fred Ward as Virgil I. "Gus" Grissom, USAF
 * Dennis Quaid as Gordon "Gordo" Cooper, USAF
 * Ed Harris as John Glenn, USMC
 * Scott Glenn as Alan Shepard, USN
 * Lance Henriksen as Walter "Wally" Schirra, USN
 * Scott Paulin as Donald K. "Deke" Slayton, USAF
 * Barbara Hershey as Glennis Yeager
 * Veronica Cartwright as Betty Grissom
 * Jane Dornacker as Nurse Murch
 * Kim Stanley as Pancho Barnes
 * Pamela Reed as Trudy Cooper
 * Charles Frank as Scott Carpenter, USN
 * Donald Moffat as U.S. Senator and Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson
 * Levon Helm as Jack Ridley, USAF; Helm also provides voice-over at the beginning and end of the film
 * Mary Jo Deschanel as Annie Glenn
 * Jeff Goldblum as NASA recruiter
 * Harry Shearer as NASA recruiter

 * Scott Wilson as Scott Crossfield, civilian test pilot for North American Aviation
 * Kathy Baker as Louise Shepard
 * Mickey Crocker as Marge Slayton
 * Susan Kase as Rene Carpenter
 * Mittie Smith as Jo Schirra
 * Royal Dano as a minister
 * David Clennon as a liaison man
 * Scott Beach as head NASA scientist based on German immigrant Wernher von Braun
 * John P. Ryan as the Head of the Manned Space Program
 * Eric Sevareid as himself
 * William Russ as Slick Goodlin
 * Robert Beer as President Dwight D. Eisenhower
 * Peggy Davis as Sally Rand
 * John Dehner as Henry Luce
 * Royce Grones as the first X-1 pilot, Jack Woolams
 * Brigadier General Chuck Yeager, USAF as Fred, the bartender at Pancho's saloon
 * Anthony Muñoz as Gonzales
 * David Gulpilil as aboriginal man

The following appeared as themselves in archive footage: Ed Sullivan with Bill Dana (in character as José Jiménez); Yuri Gagarin and Nikita Khrushchev embracing at a review, joined by Georgi Malenkov, Nikolai Bulganin, Kliment Voroshilov, and Anastas Mikoyan; Lyndon B. Johnson; John F. Kennedy; Alan Shepard (in Kennedy footage); and James E. Webb, director of NASA during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations.

Development
In 1979, independent producers Robert Chartoff and Irwin Winkler outbid Universal Pictures for the movie rights to Tom Wolfe's book, paying $350,000. They hired William Goldman to write the screenplay. Goldman wrote in his memoirs that his adaptation focused on the astronauts, entirely ignoring Chuck Yeager. Goldman was inspired to accept the job because he wanted to say something patriotic about America in the wake of the Iran hostage crisis. Winkler writes in his memoirs that he was disappointed that Goldman's adaptation ignored Yeager.

In June 1980, United Artists agreed to finance the film up to $20 million, and the producers began looking for a director. Michael Ritchie was originally attached but fell through; so did John Avildsen who, four years prior, had won an Oscar for his work under Winkler and Chartoff on the original Rocky. (The Right Stuff would have reunited Avildsen with both producers, and also with a fourth Rocky veteran, composer Bill Conti.)

Ultimately, Chartoff and Winkler approached director Philip Kaufman, who agreed to make the film, but did not like Goldman's script; Kaufman disliked the emphasis on patriotism, and wanted Yeager put back in the film. Eventually, Goldman quit the project in August 1980, and United Artists pulled out.

When Wolfe showed no interest in adapting his own book, Kaufman wrote a draft in eight weeks. His draft restored Yeager to the story, because "if you're tracing how the future began, the future in space travel, it began really with Yeager and the world of the test pilots. The astronauts descended from them."

After the financial failure of Heaven's Gate, the studio put The Right Stuff in turnaround. Then The Ladd Company stepped in with an estimated $17 million.

Casting
Actor Ed Harris auditioned twice in 1981 for the role of John Glenn. Originally, Kaufman wanted to use a troupe of contortionists to portray the press corps, but settled on the improvisational comedy troupe Fratelli Bologna, known for its sponsorship of "St. Stupid's Day" in San Francisco. The director created a locust-like chatter to accompany the press corps whenever they appear, which was achieved through a sound combination of (among other things) motorized Nikon cameras and clicking beetles.

Professional American football player Anthony Muñoz has a minor role in the film as a hospital orderly named Gonzales; the soft-spoken Muñoz was asked to lip sync his lines, and a "deeper, gruffer voice" was dubbed over him in post-production.

Filming
Most of the film was shot in and around San Francisco between March and October 1982, with additional filming continuing into January 1983. A waterfront warehouse there was transformed into a studio. Location shooting took place primarily at the abandoned Hamilton Air Force Base north of San Francisco which was converted into a sound stage for the numerous interior sets. No location could substitute for the distinctive Edwards Air Force Base landscape, so the entire production crew moved to the Mojave Desert to shoot the opening sequences that framed the story of the test pilots at Muroc Army Air Field, later Edwards AFB. Additional shooting took place in California City in early 1983. During the filming of a sequence portraying Chuck Yeager's ejection from an NF-104, stuntman Joseph Svec, a former Green Beret, was killed when he failed to open his parachute because he may have been unconscious from smoke.

In 1982, the scene of the wives of the astronauts watching the television broadcast was filmed on military housing in Novato, California.

Yeager was hired as a technical consultant on the film. He took the actors flying, studied the storyboards and special effects, and pointed out the errors. To prepare for their roles, Kaufman gave the actors playing the seven astronauts an extensive videotape collection to study.

The effort to make an authentic feature led to the use of many full-size aircraft, scale models and special effects to replicate the scenes at Edwards Air Force Base and Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. Special visual effects supervisor Gary Gutierrez said the first special effects were too clean for the desired "dirty, funky, early NASA look." So Gutierrez and his team started from scratch, employing unconventional techniques, like going up a hill with model airplanes on wires and fog machines to create clouds, or shooting model F-104s from a crossbow device and capturing their flight with up to four cameras. Avant garde filmmaker Jordan Belson created the background of the Earth as seen from high-flying planes and from orbiting spacecraft.

Kaufman gave his five editors a list of documentary images he needed, sending them off to search for film from NASA, the Air Force and Bell Aircraft vaults. They also discovered Russian stock footage not viewed in 30 years. During production, Kaufman met with resistance from the Ladd Company and threatened to quit several times. In December 1982, one reel of cut workprint of the film that included portions of John Glenn's flight disappeared from Kaufman's editing facility in San Francisco's Dogpatch neighborhood. The missing reel of cut workprint was never found, but was reconstructed using a black and white duplicate copy of the reel as a guide and reprinting new workprint from the original negative, which was always safely in storage at the film lab.

Historical accuracy
Although The Right Stuff was based on historic events and real people, some substantial dramatic liberties were taken. Neither Yeager's flight in the X-1 to break the sound barrier early in the film or his later, nearly fatal flight in the NF-104A were spur-of-moment, capriciously decided events, as the film seems to imply – they actually were part of the routine testing program for both aircraft. Yeager had already test-flown both aircraft a number of times previously and was very familiar with them. Jack Ridley had actually died in 1957, even though his character appears in several key scenes taking place after that, most notably including Yeager's 1963 flight of the NF-104A.

The Right Stuff depicts Cooper arriving at Edwards in 1953, reminiscing with Grissom there about the two of them having supposedly flown together at the Langley Air Force Base and then hanging out with Grissom and Slayton, including all three supposedly being present at Edwards when Scott Crossfield flew at Mach 2 in November 1953. The film shows the three of them being recruited together there for the astronaut program in late 1957, with Grissom supposedly expressing keen interest in becoming a "star-voyager". According to their respective NASA biographies, none of the three was posted to Edwards before 1955 (Slayton in 1955 and Grissom and Cooper in 1956, ) and neither of the latter two had previously trained at Langley. By the time astronaut recruitment began in late 1957 after the Soviets had orbited Sputnik, Grissom had already left Edwards and returned to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, where he had served previously and was happy with his new assignment there. Grissom did not even know he was under consideration for the astronaut program until he received mysterious orders "out of the blue" to report to Washington in civilian clothing for what turned out to be a recruitment session for NASA.

While the film took liberties with certain historical facts as part of "dramatic license", criticism focused on one: the portrayal of Gus Grissom panicking when his Liberty Bell 7 spacecraft sank following splashdown. Most historians, as well as engineers working for or with NASA and many of the related contractor agencies within the aerospace industry, are now convinced that the premature detonation of the spacecraft hatch's explosive bolts was caused by mechanical failure not associated with direct human error or deliberate detonation by Grissom. This determination had been made long before the film was completed. Many astronauts, including Schirra, Cooper and Shepard, were critical of The Right Stuff for its treatment of Grissom, who was killed in the Apollo 1 launch pad fire in January 1967 and thus unable to defend himself when the film was being made.

Other notable inaccuracies include: early termination of Glenn's flight after three orbits instead of seven (in reality, the flight was scheduled for at most three orbits); the engineers who built the Mercury craft are portrayed as Germans (in reality, they were mostly Americans).

Film models

A large number of film models were assembled for the production; for the more than 80 aircraft appearing in the film, static mock-ups and models were used as well as authentic aircraft of the period. Lieutenant Colonel Duncan Wilmore, USAF (Ret) acted as the United States Air Force liaison to the production, beginning his role as a technical consultant in 1980 when the pre-production planning had begun. The first draft of the script in 1980 had concentrated only on the Mercury 7, but as subsequent revisions developed the treatment into more of the original story that Wolfe had envisioned, the aircraft of the late-1940s that would have been seen at Edwards AFB were required. Wilmore gathered World War II era "prop" aircraft including:
 * Douglas A-26 Invader
 * North American P-51 Mustang
 * North American T-6 Texan and
 * Boeing B-29 Superfortress

The first group were mainly "set dressing" on the ramp while the Confederate Air Force (now renamed the Commemorative Air Force) B-29 "Fifi" was modified to act as the B-29 "mothership" to carry the Bell X-1 and X-1A rocket-powered record-breakers.

Other "real" aircraft included the early jet fighters and trainers as well as current USAF and United States Navy examples. These flying aircraft and helicopters included:
 * Douglas A-4 Skyhawk
 * LTV A-7 Corsair II
 * North American F-86 Sabre
 * Convair F-106 Delta Dart
 * McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantom II
 * Sikorsky H-34 Choctaw
 * Sikorsky SH-3 Sea King
 * Lockheed T-33 Shooting Star
 * Northrop T-38 Talon

A number of aircraft significant to the story had to be recreated. The first was an essentially static X-1 that had to at least roll along the ground and realistically "belch flame" by a simulated rocket blast from the exhaust pipes. A series of wooden mock-up X-1s were used to depict interior shots of the cockpit, the mating up of the X-1 to a modified B-29 fuselage and bomb bay and ultimately to recreate flight in a combination of model work and live-action photography. The "follow-up" X-1A was also an all-wooden model.

The U.S. Navy's Douglas D-558-2 Skyrocket that Crossfield duelled with Yeager's X-1 and X-1A was recreated from a modified Hawker Hunter jet fighter. The climactic flight of Yeager in a Lockheed NF-104A was originally to be made with a modified Lockheed F-104 Starfighter but ultimately, Wilmore decided that the production had to make do with a repainted Luftwaffe F-104G, which lacks the rocket engine of the NF-104.

Wooden mock-ups of the Mercury space capsules also realistically depicted the NASA spacecraft and were built from the original mold.

For many of the flying sequences, scale models were produced by USFX Studios and filmed outdoors in natural sunlight against the sky. Even off-the-shelf plastic scale models were utilized for aerial scenes. The X-1, F-104 and B-29 models were built in large numbers as a number of the more than 40 scale models were destroyed in the process of filming. The blending together of miniatures, full-scale mock-ups and actual aircraft was seamlessly integrated into the live-action footage. The addition of original newsreel footage was used sparingly but to effect to provide another layer of authenticity.

Box office
The Right Stuff had its world premiere on October 16, 1983, at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., to benefit the American Film Institute. It was given a limited release on October 21, 1983, in 229 theaters, grossing $1.6 million on its opening weekend. It went into wide release on February 17, 1984, in 627 theaters where it grossed an additional $1.6 million on that weekend. Despite this, the movie bombed at the box office with $21.1 million (domestically). The failure of this and Twice Upon a Time caused The Ladd Company to shut down.

As part of the promotion for the film, Veronica Cartwright, Chuck Yeager, Gordon Cooper, Scott Glenn and Dennis Quaid appeared in 1983 at ConStellation, the 41st World Science Fiction Convention in Baltimore.

Reviews
The Right Stuff received overwhelming acclaim from critics. The film holds a 96% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes based on 52 reviews, with an average score of 8.80/10. The website's critical consensus reads: "The Right Stuff packs a lot of movie into its hefty running time, spinning a colorful, fact-based story out of consistently engaging characters in the midst of epochal events." On Metacritic — which assigns a weighted mean score — the film has a score of 91 out of 100 based on 16 critics, indicating "universal acclaim".

Gene Siskel, Ebert's co-host of At the Movies, also named The Right Stuff the best film of 1983, and said: "It's a great film, and I hope everyone sees it." Siskel also went on to include The Right Stuff at #3 on his list of the best films of the 1980s, behind Shoah and Raging Bull.

In his review for Newsweek, David Ansen wrote: "When The Right Stuff takes to the skies, it can't be compared with any other movie, old or new: it's simply the most thrilling flight footage ever put on film". Gary Arnold in his review for the Washington Post, wrote: "The movie is obviously so solid and appealing that it's bound to go through the roof commercially and keep on soaring for the next year or so". In his review for The New York Times, Vincent Canby praised Shepard's performance: "Both as the character he plays and as an iconic screen presence, Mr. Shepard gives the film much well-needed heft. He is the center of gravity".

Colin Greenland reviewed The Right Stuff for Imagine, and stated: "It is the film's willingness to question [...] idealism, while laying down some very fine footage of things that are moving very fast, which makes The Right Stuff thoroughly absorbing for nearly three and a quarter hours."

Tom Wolfe made no secret of his dislike for the film, especially because of changes from his original book. William Goldman also disliked the choices made by Kaufman, writing in his 1983 book Adventures in the Screen Trade: "Phil [Kaufman]'s heart was with Yeager. And not only that, he felt the astronauts, rather than being heroic, were really minor leaguers, mechanical men of no particular quality, not great pilots at all, simply the product of hype."

The Mercury Seven astronauts were mostly negative about the film. In an early interview, Deke Slayton said that none of the film "was all that accurate, but it was well done." However, in his memoirs, Slayton described the film as being "as bad as the book was good, just a joke". Wally Schirra liked the book a lot, but expressed disappointment and dislike for the movie, and he never forgave the producers for portraying Gus Grissom as a "bungling sort of coward", which was totally untrue. In an interview, Schirra said: "It was the best book on space, but the movie was distorted and warped... All the astronauts hated [the movie]. We called it Animal House in Space." In another interview, Schirra said: "They insulted the lovely people who talked us through the program - the NASA engineers. They made them like bumbling Germans". Scott Carpenter said that it was a "great movie in all regards". Alan Shepard harshly criticized both the movie and the book: "Neither Tom Wolfe nor [Philip Kaufman] had talked to any of the original seven guys, at any time... The Right Stuff [both the film and the book] is fiction... The movie assumed that Grissom had panicked, which wasn't true at all. The movie made him look like a bad guy for the whole movie. They were very hard on John Glenn's wife, who had a mild speech problem. They made Lyndon Johnson look like a clown. It was just totally fiction."

Chuck Yeager said of his characterization: "Sam [Shepard] is not a real flamboyant actor, and I'm not a real flamboyant-type individual ... he played his role the way I fly airplanes".

Robert Osborne, who introduced showings of the film on Turner Classic Movies, was quite enthusiastic about the film. The cameo appearance by the real Chuck Yeager in the film was a particular "treat", which Osborne cited. The recounting of many of the legendary aspects of Yeager's life was left in place, including the naming of the X-1, "Glamorous Glennis" after his wife and his superstitious preflight ritual of asking for a stick of Beemans chewing gum from his best friend, Jack Ridley.

Awards and nominations
American Film Institute

 * AFI's 100 Years... 100 Cheers – #19

Home media
On June 23, 2003, Warner Bros. Pictures released a two-disc DVD Special Edition that featured scene-specific commentaries with key cast and crew members, deleted scenes, three documentaries on the making of The Right Stuff including interviews with Mercury astronauts and Chuck Yeager, and a feature-length PBS documentary, John Glenn: American Hero. These extras are also included in the November 5, 2013 release of the 30th Anniversary edition, which also includes a 40-page book binding case, with the film in Blu-ray format. The extras are in standard DVD format.

In addition, the British Film Institute published a book on The Right Stuff by Tom Charity in October 1997 that offered a detailed analysis and behind-the-scenes anecdotes.

Soundtrack
Although an album mix had been prepared by Bill Conti in 1983 (and indeed the poster contains the credit "Original Soundtrack Available On Geffen Records"), the soundtrack album release was cancelled following the film's disappointing box office. In 1986, Conti conducted a re-recording of selections from the score and from his music for North and South, performed by the London Symphony Orchestra and released by Varèse Sarabande The original soundtrack was released by Varèse Sarabande on September 20, 2013, prepared from the 1983 album mix (as the original masters of the complete score were lost).

title: The Right Stuff (film)


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William H. Prescott

William Hickling Prescott (May 4, 1796 – January 28, 1859) was an American historian and Hispanist, who is widely recognized by historiographers to have been the first American scientific historian. Despite having serious visual impairment, which at times prevented him from reading or writing for himself, Prescott became one of the most eminent historians of 19th century America. He is also noted for his eidetic memory, also called "Photographic Memory".

After an extensive period of study, during which he sporadically contributed to academic journals, Prescott specialized in late Renaissance Spain and the early Spanish Empire. His works on the subject, The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella the Catholic (1837), The History of the Conquest of Mexico (1843), A History of the Conquest of Peru (1847) and the unfinished History of the Reign of Phillip II (1856–1858) have become classic works in the field, and have had a great impact on the study of both Spain and Mesoamerica. During his lifetime, he was upheld as one of the greatest living American intellectuals, and knew personally many of the leading political figures of the day, in both the United States and Britain. Prescott has become one of the most widely translated American historians, and was an important figure in the development of history as a rigorous academic discipline. Historians admire Prescott for his exhaustive, careful, and systematic use of archives, his accurate recreation of sequences of events, his balanced judgments and his lively writing style. He was primarily focused on political and military affairs, largely ignoring economic, social, intellectual, and cultural forces that in recent decades historians have focused on. Instead, he wrote narrative history, subsuming unstated causal forces in his driving storyline.

Early life

William H. Prescott was born in Salem, Massachusetts, on May 4, 1796, the first of seven children, although four of his siblings died in infancy. His parents were William Prescott Jr., a lawyer, and his wife, née Catherine Greene Hickling. His grandfather William Prescott served as a colonel during the American Revolutionary War.

Prescott began formal schooling at the age of seven, studying under Mr. Jacob Knapp. The family moved to Boston, Massachusetts, in 1808, where his father's earnings substantially increased. His studies continued under Dr. John Gardiner, rector of Trinity Episcopal Church. As a young man, Prescott frequented the Boston Athenæum, which at the time held the 10,000-volume private library of John Quincy Adams, who was on a diplomatic mission to Russia. In 1832, Prescott became a trustee of the library, a position he held for 15 years.

Prescott enrolled at Harvard College as a second year student (sophomore) in August 1811, at the age of 15. He was not considered academically distinguished, despite showing promise in Latin and Greek. Prescott found mathematics particularly difficult, and resorted to memorizing mathematical demonstrations word-for-word, which he could do with relative ease, in order to hide his ignorance of the subject. Prescott's eyesight degenerated after being hit in the eye with a crust of bread during a food fight as a student, and it remained weak and unstable throughout the rest of his life. Prescott was admitted to the Phi Beta Kappa Society as a senior, which he considered a great personal honor, and graduated from Harvard in 1814. After a short period of rheumatic illness, he embarked on an extended tour of Europe.

Prescott first traveled to the island of São Miguel in the Azores, where his grandfather and Portuguese grandmother lived. After two weeks, he left for the cooler climate of London, where he stayed with the distinguished surgeon Astley Cooper and the oculist William Adams. Prescott first used a noctograph while staying with Adams; the tool became a permanent feature of his life, allowing him to write independently in spite of his impaired eyesight. He visited Hampton Court Palace with future American president John Quincy Adams, at the time a diplomat in London, where they saw the Raphael Cartoons. In August 1816, Prescott traveled to Paris, but later moved on to Italy, where he spent the winter. He returned to Paris in early 1817, where he chanced to meet the American Hispanist George Ticknor, and made another visit to England. Prescott spent some time in Cambridge, where he saw the manuscripts of Isaac Newton's works, and returned to the United States in the same year. Prescott's first academic work, an essay submitted anonymously, was rejected by the North American Review in late 1817. After a short period of courtship, he married Susan Amory, the daughter of Thomas Coffin Amory and Hannah Rowe Linzee, on May 4, 1820.

Early career: The History of Ferdinand and Isabella
In 1821, Prescott abandoned the idea of a legal career because of the continued deterioration of his eyesight, and resolved to devote himself to literature. Although he initially studied a wide range of subjects, including Italian, French, English and Spanish literature, American history, classics and political philosophy, Prescott came to focus on Italian poetry. Among the works he studied during this period were such classics as Dante's Divine Comedy and Boccaccio's Decameron. His first published works were two essays in the North American Review—both discussing Italian poetry. The first of these, published in 1824, was titled Italian Narrative Poetry, and became somewhat controversial after it was heavily criticized in an Italian review by Lorenzo Da Ponte, the librettist of Mozart's Don Giovanni. Prescott wrote a succinct reply to Da Ponte's fifty-page argument in the North American Review of July 1825. Da Ponte published the criticisms as an appendix to his translation of Dodley's Economy of Human life, which resulted in Prescott noticing them rather late.

Prescott first became interested in the history of Spain after his friend, the Harvard professor George Ticknor, sent him copies of his lectures on the subject. Prescott's studies initially remained broad, but he started preparing material on Ferdinand and Isabella in January 1826. His acquaintance Pascual de Gayangos y Arce helped him construct a sizable personal library of historical books and manuscripts concerning the subject. Alexander Hill Everett, an American diplomat in Spain, also provided him with material which was unavailable to Prescott in Boston. However, progress was stalled almost immediately, due to a sudden deterioration in Prescott's eyesight. Unable to find a reader fluent in Spanish, Prescott was forced to work through Spanish texts with an assistant who did not understand the language. When Alexander Everett heard of this situation, he provided Prescott with the services of George Lunt, who had adequate knowledge of Spanish for the task. However, this could only be a temporary arrangement, and he was replaced by a man named Hamilton Parker, who held the position for a year. Eventually George Ticknor, who was by then in charge of the department of modern literature at Harvard University, found James L. English, who worked with Prescott until 1831. Among the books studied by Prescott in this period, Ticknor lists Juan Antonio Llorente's Historia crítica de la Inquisición de España, Historia de los Reyes Católicos don Fernando y doña Isabel by Andrés Bernáldez, Voltaire's Charles XII and William Roscoe's Life of Lorenzo de' Medici, which were to be the sources on which the History of Ferdinand and Isabella was to be based. In spring 1828, Prescott visited Washington, where he and Ticknor dined with John Quincy Adams at the White House, and saw Congress in session.

Due in part to his own condition, Prescott was interested in aiding the blind and partially sighted. The Perkins School for the Blind, then known as the New England Asylum, had been founded in Boston, Massachusetts by Samuel Gridley Howe, Thomas Handasyd Perkins and John Dix Fisher and 28 others in 1829. Prescott involved himself from the very start of the project, becoming a trustee in 1830. He published an article in support of education for the blind in the North American Review of July 1830, and helped to raise $50,000 for the organization in May 1833.

His work was disturbed in February 1829 by the unexpected death of his eldest daughter Catherine, who was only four years old. This led him to reconsider his position on religion—previously an agnostic, his interest in Christianity was renewed, and having read the Bible, the works of the theologian William Paley as well as more skeptical works such as Hume's Of Miracles, he came to acknowledge the "moral truth" of the gospels, while remaining opposed to the doctrines of orthodox Christianity. Despite this personal tragedy, and his own continued ill health, Prescott had gathered sufficient material to begin drafting the History in October 1829. At around this time, Prescott read the works of Gabriel Bonnot de Mably, including his historiographical piece De l’étude de l’histoire. He henceforth aimed to write history to de Mably's romantic ideal, and on more than one occasion expressed his indebtedness to him. Prescott also encountered Elogia de la Réina Doña Isabel, by his Spanish contemporary Diego Clemencín, which helped shape his views concerning the monarchs' political roles. Due to further problems with his eyesight, it took him sixteen months to write the first three hundred pages of the History. It was largely finished by 1834, but Prescott dedicated two years to abridging and redrafting it. He was also briefly engaged in writing a biography of Charles Brockden Brown for Jared Sparks' Library of American Biography. Prescott was not familiar with American literature, and he based the work on other contemporary biographies of Brown. As a result, the biography has had little academic impact. In 1835, he took residence in the rural town of Nahant, Massachusetts, due to concerns about his health. He was here accustomed to riding his horses for the purpose of exercise, and he persevered even in sub-zero temperatures. Prescott finished the concluding chapter of the work in July 1836, and despite the amount of time and effort which he had spent on the work, was at first unsure about publishing it. However, his father argued that refusing to do so would amount to cowardice, and this swayed him. Prescott had previously considered publishing the work in London first, and therefore a printed draft copy of the work was sent to a Colonel Aspinwall for consideration. However, both Longman and Murray, which were at the time the leading British publishers, refused the work, and Prescott decided to postpone.

The History of Ferdinand and Isabella was published on Christmas Day, 1837 by the American Stationery Company, Boston, with a print run of 500 copies. It was dedicated to his father. To the surprise of Prescott and the publisher, the book sold very well—the original print run was insufficient to adequately supply Boston's bookshops, let alone the whole nation's. It was first published in London by Richard Bentley in early 1838. The work received excellent critical reviews, both in America and in Britain, where Henry Vassall-Fox and Robert Southey expressed their admiration of the work. It was also noticed in France, despite the fact that a French translation was not available at the time. Prescott was adamant that his work should not be altered by anyone other than himself, and when he heard that his publishers were considering an abridgement of the History of Ferdinand and Isabella in June 1839, he produced an abridgement of the work himself, which resulted in the original project's cancellation. He was elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society in May 1839.

The History of the Conquest of Mexico
Prescott expressed interest in his correspondence in writing a biography of Molière, and Ticknor records that he sent Prescott "a collection of about 50 volumes" of relevant material. However, after writing to Ángel Calderón de la Barca, a Spanish minister living in Mexico, who was able to provide source material, Prescott started research on what was to become the History of the Conquest of Mexico. He extensively read the works of Alexander von Humboldt, who had written on Mesoamerica, and started corresponding with the historian Washington Irving, the Swiss writer Sismondi and the French historian Jacques Nicolas Augustin Thierry. He also received assistance in collecting sources from a college friend, Middleton, and a Dr. Lembke. In contrast to the lengthy time spent researching the History of Ferdinand and Isabella, Prescott started drafting the History of the Conquest of Mexico in October 1839. However, Prescott faced difficulties in writing the work which he had not encountered previously. There was relatively little scholarship on Aztec civilization, and Prescott dismissed much of it as "speculation", and he therefore had to rely almost exclusively on primary sources (with the exception of Humboldt). In particular, he considered Edward King's theory that the pre-Columbian civilizations were non-indigenous to be fallacious, although he was greatly indebted to him for his anthology of Aztec codices in the Antiquities of Mexico. Prescott also studied Spanish writers contemporary to the conquest, most significantly Torquemada and Toribio de Benavente.

Prescott received three honorary degrees in this period—an honorary doctorate in laws from Columbia University in autumn 1840, the College of William and Mary in July 1841 and South Carolina College in December 1841. He also helped Frances Inglis find a publisher for her autobiographical work Life in Mexico. Moreover, Frances Inglis was one of Prescott's most valuable correspondents during the writing of the History of the Conquest of Mexico. She is cited by Prescott five times throughout the text, and is described by him as, "one of the most delightful of modern travellers." Prescott found it difficult to evaluate Mesoamerican scientific and mathematical achievements, because of his relative ignorance of those subjects. While working in Boston in 1841, he met George Howard, who was to stay a close friend for the remainder of his life. Prescott worked industriously throughout 1840–1842, and as a result, the work was finished by August 1843. It was published by Harper & Brothers, New York in December, Bentley issuing the British edition. His elderly father had had a stroke in October, which resulted in temporary paralysis, so Prescott spent most of the winter attending him in Pepperell. The History of the Conquest of Mexico was received extremely well, both critically and by the general public, despite Prescott's fears to the contrary. Those praising the work included George Hillard in the North American Review, George Ticknor Curtis in the Christian Examiner, Joseph Cogswell in the Methodist Quarterly, as well as the Dean of St. Paul's, Henry Hart Milman in the Quarterly Review. However, the Mexican author José Fernando Ramírez was a critic of the work.

The Conquest of Peru
In 1844, Prescott was painted by Joseph Alexander Ames, and also commissioned a bust from Richard Saltonstall Greenough. He was not active in researching for the Conquest of Peru until spring 1844, although he had already decided to write a work concerning Inca civilization while researching pre-Columbian Mexico, and listened to Inca Garcilaso de la Vega's Comentarios Reales de los Incas. He further studied Pedro Cieza de León's Crónicas del Perú, the works of Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa and Diego Fernández's Primera y segunda parte de la Historia del Piru. Prescott's progress was stalled by the unexpected death of his brother Edward at sea. His daughter Elizabeth was seriously ill, so Prescott and his family traveled to Niagara, which he considered a more healthy environment for her. After her recovery, they returned to Nahant in the summer, where Prescott started drafting the Conquest, and, as was his custom, spent the autumn in Peperell. Prescott's father died at the age of 82 on December 8, which deeply upset him. He took a two-month break from writing to support his widowed mother and settle matters concerning his father's estate. His father left numerous stocks, shares and property that amounted to $343,737, almost all of which was shared between Prescott and his sister. Prescott was elected to the Institut de France in February 1845, in recognition of his accomplishments as a historian. He took the place of Martín Fernández de Navarrete, who had died the previous year, after a vote was cast. He was also admitted to the Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin. In the summer of 1845, a collection of articles Prescott had published in the North American Review were published as Biographical and Critical Miscellanies by Bentley in octavo, and an edition was also prepared simultaneously by Harper & Brothers in New York. Prescott was writing 12 pages of the work per day in the summer of 1845, and completed the first two chapters of the Conquest. He used the inheritance from his father to buy a house on Beacon Street in Boston. The building is now a National Historic Landmark, and is also known as the William Hickling Prescott House. Prescott moved into the house during December 1845, and set himself a year to finish the Conquest of Peru. In March, his eyesight, which had recovered significantly, suddenly deteriorated. Prescott also had acute dyspepsia and rheumatism, and he travelled to Nahant to "benefit from the sea-air". This did not prevent him travelling to Washington, where he dined at the White House with President James K. Polk. He was also entertained by John Y. Mason, the former United States Secretary of the Navy, who informed him that a copy of Prescott's Conquest of Mexico had been placed in the library of every fighting ship. The Conquest of Peru was completed in March 1847. As with previous works, it was published by Harper & Brothers in the United States and Bentley in Britain. The original US print run was 7,500 copies, and the books were sold for $1 each. It was translated into Spanish, French, German and Dutch, and sold excellently. As with his previous works, it was also well-received critically.

Research on Philip II
Shortly after the publication of the Conquest of Peru, Prescott turned his mind to writing a history of Philip II of Spain, which he had been contemplating for several years. John Lothrop Motley, who planned to write an independent work on the subject, was aided by Prescott, who gave him access to his library. Although the two corresponded, there seems to have been little collaboration on their respective works. Prescott had started searching for sources as early as 1842, but a number of difficulties confronted him in his study of Philip II. The principal archives of historical material were held in Simancas, but neither Lembke (who had collected materials for the Conquest of Mexico) nor Middleton were able to gain access to them. They had been informed that the library was so disordered as to make productive research impossible, even if access had been gained. However, Lembke, who as a diplomat had been expelled from Spain, made the acquaintance of two wealthy Parisian scholars, Mignet and Ternaux-Compans, who offered him access to their manuscript collections. Furthermore, de Gayangos assisted greatly by locating important documents in the British Museum and in the collection of the bibliomaniac Thomas Phillipps, who owned around 60,000 manuscripts. He also borrowed several manuscripts from the archives in Brussels, having received letters from the respected Belgian diplomat Sylvain Van de Weyer in London. de Gayangos became Professor of Arabic literature at the Complutense University of Madrid in late 1842, and subsequently lent Prescott rare books and manuscripts from the university library. By the summer of 1848, Prescott had over 300 works on the subject at his disposal, but he continued to have serious problems with his eyesight; an examination by an oculist confirmed that there was untreatable damage to his retina. Prescott had been commissioned by the Massachusetts Historical Society to write a biography of the scholar John Pickering in 1848, which he wrote for publication later in that year. Prescott was invited to write a history of the Mexican–American War, but declined, as he was uninterested in writing on contemporary events.

Prescott's main secondary source for the history was Leopold von Ranke's Fürsten und Völker von Süd-Europa im sechzehnten und siebzehnten Jahrhundert, a comprehensive work which included a detailed history of the papacy. Prescott admired Ranke's empirical historical method, and considered his work to be the best of his predecessors on the subject. He had four copies of the relevant sections of the work reprinted in a large typeface so he could read it without assistance. He had made a broad plan of the work by February 1849. Prescott started writing the draft on July 26. At this time, Prescott was a creditor of John White Webster, the chemist and murderer, and he was subsequently involved in his trial.

Visits to Washington and Europe
Prescott visited Washington D.C. in spring 1850, where he met Zachary Taylor, then President of the United States, as well as numerous other prominent figures, including Henry Bulwer, the British ambassador, and Daniel Webster, the former Secretary of State, who had been a friend of Prescott's father. Soon afterward, he decided to visit England. He embarked from New York on May 22, and arrived at Liverpool on June 3. There he stayed with an old friend, Alexander Smith, and became reacquainted with Mary Lyell, the wife of the geologist Charles Lyell. He traveled with the Lyells to London, where they stayed in Mivart's Hotel. Prescott was greeted in London, as in Washington, by the most important members of society—he dined with the Foreign Secretary and future Prime Minister Henry Temple, the former Prime Minister Robert Peel, as well as the elderly Duke of Wellington. He went to the races at Ascot, and was presented at court to Queen Victoria. On June 22, he traveled to Oxford to receive an honorary doctorate in law. In Oxford, he stayed at Cuddesdon Palace, the home of the Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce, who was absent because of the christening of the infant Prince Arthur. Prescott met Spencer Compton, the president of the Royal Society, who was also receiving an honorary degree. He left London for Paris, where he arrived on July 20. Two days later, he traveled to Brussels, where he stayed in Coudenberg, the site of a residence of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, returning to London on July 29. Traveling north, Prescott visited Alnwick Castle and the ruins of Hulm Abbey in Northumbria. On his arrival in Edinburgh, he met the geologists Adam Sedgwick and Roderick Murchison, whom he accompanied to Inveraray, where he visited Inveraray Castle. Prescott then traveled south, through Staffordshire, where he was entertained by George Sutherland-Leveson-Gower. He embarked for New York on September 14, arriving on September 27.

Final works
Prescott spent the winter in Boston, and returned to the composition of his work. He gradually changed the focus of the History, deciding that he was a better writer of history than biography and worked solidly for the next two years, alternating between Boston and Nahant. This period was interrupted only by the marriage of his daughter Elizabeth in early 1852. Her husband was James Alexander; they settled in a house near the family home in Pepperell. Prescott's mother fell ill on May 17 and died soon after, which caused Prescott to fall into a bout of depression that lasted until the winter. He returned to his work, and continued at the pace that he was able through the remainder of 1852 and 1853, which passed uneventfully. Prescott started to suffer seriously from rheumatism during the former year, and as a result he abandoned his residence at Nahant. He bought a house in the then rural town of Lynn, Massachusetts, where he was visited by Charles Lyell and his family in June 1853. On August 22, he finished the second volume of the History. The first two volumes were finished by May 1855, but not immediately published. Changes in British copyright law and a change of publishers caused Prescott to delay publication until November. Compared to his previous works, the History received little coverage in the press or in academic journals. It was suggested to him at this time that he should write a biography of Charles V, but he declined, as he regarded the work of William Robertson on the subject to be definitive. However, he wrote an appendix to Robertson's The History of the reign of Charles V in May 1855; it was published in December 1856. Previously uninterested in politics (although he had predicted the Whig victory in 1840, ) Prescott supported and voted for the Republican John C. Frémont in the 1856 Presidential election. He continued to work on the third volume of the History until he had a stroke on February 3, 1858. Prescott recovered, but his health was permanently affected, and he decided to temporarily retire from writing. The third volume was therefore published in April, and its scope was more limited than Prescott had originally planned. He worked on the Spanish translation of the Conquest of Mexico, which had been prepared by José Fernando Ramírez and Lucas Alamán.

Personal life
William H. Prescott and Susan Amory Prescott (c. 1799–1859) had four children; the first, Catherine Prescott (1824–1829) died of a childhood illness. William Gardiner Prescott (1826–1895) attended Harvard from 1841 to 1844 and worked as a lawyer in Boston. He married Josephine Augusta Peabody on November 6, 1851, and inherited Headquarters House. William Gardiner's daughter Catherine Elizabeth Prescott married Hebert Timmins on February 22, 1887. Elizabeth (1828–1864) married James Lawrence, a distant cousin. The youngest was William Amory (1830–1867).

In 1837, he was elected as a member of the American Philosophical Society. In 1845 Prescott was elected an honorary member of the Massachusetts Society of the Cincinnati.

Death and legacy
In January 1859, Prescott decided to resume his work on Philip II, with the goal of writing a final fourth volume History of the Reign of Phillip II (1856–1858) which was completed only up to the year 1568 featuring the deaths of Phillips son Carlos, Prince of Asturias and of Phllips 3rd wife Elisabeth of Valois. On January 28, he had a second stroke, which resulted in his immediate death. He was buried with his parents in St. Paul's Church, and his funeral was attended by representatives, among others, of Harvard University, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Essex Institute.

Prescott's work has remained popular and influential to the present day, and his meticulous use of sources, bibliographical citations and critical notes was unprecedented among American historians. As the work of an amateur historian, the History of Ferdinand and Isabella was an outstanding achievement, and it arguably was the best English-language work on the subject published until then. The major problems with the work to the modern day historian are not related to the quality of the research or Prescott's understanding of the period, but rather that his focus is on the major political and military events as opposed to social and economic conditions. It has also been argued that Prescott partially subscribed to the Great Man theory. The Conquest of Mexico has endured more than any other of Prescott's work: it is regarded as his greatest literary accomplishment. However, modern scholarship agrees that there are problems with Prescott's characterization of the conquest. David Levin has argued that the Conquest shows "inadequate attention to detail" and remains a broad and general account of events. In contrast to the Conquest of Mexico, the Conquest of Peru has received relatively little modern scholarly attention, perhaps due to some key similarities in style and structure. However, it is generally thought that the work was the authoritative account until the 20th century, and that Prescott used a broader range of source material than any previous writer on the subject. However, the archeological and anthropological aspects of both works have been heavily criticized by historians since the end of the 19th century. Prescott had never visited archeological sites in Mesoamerica and his understanding of Inca and Aztec culture was weak. In defense of Prescott, it has been argued that despite advances in archeological understanding, and a reconceptualization of the nature of pre-Columbian society, the works remain broadly historically accurate, and Prescott's elaborations on fact were due to a fundamental lack of source material. In contrast, Phillip the Second is considered essentially an inferior piece—it lacks the epic structure and literary merits of Prescott's other work, and the work has not received more critical attention than other contemporary accounts of the monarch's life.

There is a popular misconception that Prescott was completely blind, which seems to have stemmed from a misunderstanding of his comment in the preface to The Conquest of Mexico, in which he stated, "Nor have I ever corrected, or even read, my own original draft". The myth was further propagated by a contemporary New York review of the Conquest, and has been a common theme in popular accounts of his work. Other related embellishments of Prescott's disability have also occurred—Samuel Eliot Morison, writing in a 1959 article for The Atlantic Monthly, claimed that Prescott had an artificial eye, although there is no evidence to suggest this. It has been argued that Prescott's biographers have naturally been drawn to romanticize his life due to Prescott's own romantic style of history.

Four biographies of Prescott have been written. In 1864, George Ticknor published a biography based on Prescott's then-unpublished correspondence, to which the later biographers have been greatly indebted. Rollo Ogden's 1904 account is more a stylistic modernization of Ticknor's work. Harry Thurston Peck's 1905 account is considered academically inferior due to its essentially derivative nature. C. Harvey Gardiner's 1969 work is considered the definitive critical biography of Prescott, taking into account a wide range of unpublished documents that were unavailable to earlier biographers.

The City of Prescott in Arizona was named in his honor, as was the William H. Prescott House (Headquarters House), which was designated a National Historic Landmark for its association with him. Colegio Anglo Americano Prescott, a school in Arequipa, Peru, also bears his name. Prescott Street, two blocks from Harvard Yard in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is named after him.

Historian Richard Kagan has identified "Prescott's Paradigm" as a 19th-century interpretive model first fully articulated by Prescott. It argues that Spain's early modern 'decline' and subsequent 'torpor' was a product of its religious bigotry and political despotism. The Prescott Paradigm was dominant in 20th century American historiography, but was showing signs of decline by the 1990s. Kagan wrote:
 * What I call "Prescott's paradigm" is an understanding of Spain as the antithesis of the United States. Most of the elements contained in this paradigm—anti-Catholicism, criticism of absolutism, support for commerce and individual liberty—were to be found in the work of other writers, but Prescott bundled them into a single package that offered a means of approaching Spanish history through the lens of that of U.S. history.

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