Short answers, pulled from the story.
A Stillness at Appomattox won both the Pulitzer Prize for History and the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 1954. Published in 1953, it was the third volume of Catton's Army of the Potomac trilogy and his first commercially successful work.
Bruce Catton was born in Petoskey, Michigan, on the 9th of October, 1899, and raised in Benzonia, Michigan. His father was a Congregationalist minister who ran the Benzonia Academy.
The Bruce Catton Prize was a biennial award for lifetime achievement in the writing of history, given from 1984 to 2006 by the Society of American Historians in cooperation with American Heritage Publishing Company. It carried a cash award of two thousand five hundred dollars. Recipients included C. Vann Woodward, John Hope Franklin, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and Bernard Bailyn.
Catton was the founding editor of American Heritage, a position he accepted in 1954. He served initially as writer, reviewer, and editor, and wrote the statement of purpose for the magazine's first issue.
Historian Lloyd Lewis wrote the first volume of the trilogy, Captain Sam Grant, in 1950, but died before completing the project. Lewis's widow, Kathryn Lewis, personally selected Catton to continue the work and provided him with her husband's research.
Gore Vidal called Catton that ubiquitous clone of Parson Weems, accusing him of a hagiographic approach to prominent Americans. Vidal cited specifically Catton's dismissal of accounts of Ulysses S. Grant's alcohol use during the Civil War as an example of his tendency to present American leaders in an uncritically favorable light.