Wilder. Reception In a review of Catton's memoir, Waiting for the Morning Train, New York Times writer Webster Schott wrote, looking back over Catton's career, that "As much as anyone who has ever written about the Civil War, Bruce Catton made it real. Catton not only told us how and why it happened, he made us feel it. He brought to his writing an extraordinary combination of scholarship, literary skill and intimate concern." Oliver Jensen, who succeeded Catton as editor of American Heritage, wrote that "No one ever wrote American history with more easy grace, beauty and emotional power, or greater understanding of its meaning, than Bruce Catton... 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." American writer Gore Vidal criticized Catton for a hagiographic approach to writing about prominent Americans of the past, calling him "that ubiquitous clone of Parson Weems." Vidal groups Catton with American historians who "never accept as a fact anything that might obscure those figures illuminated by the high noon of Demos...." As an example, he cites Catton's dismissal of stories related to Grant's alcohol consumption during the Civil War and places Catton "in Parson Weems land where all our presidents were good and some were great and none ever served out his term without visibly growing in office." Personal life On August 16, 1925, Catton married Hazel H. Cherry. During 1926, they had a son, William Bruce Catton, who taught history at Princeton University and at Middlebury College, Vermont, where he was the first Charles A. Dana Professor of History. Death and legacy Bruce Catton died in a hospital near his summer home at Frankfort, Michigan, after a respiratory illness. He was buried in Benzonia Township Cemetery in Benzie County, Michigan. 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." Of the many Civil War historians, Catton was arguably the most prolific and popular. Oliver Jensen, who succeeded him as editor of the magazine American Heritage, wrote: The Bruce Catton Collection is housed in the Archives of The Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina. The Civil War Documentary