Historian, author, and editor Bruce Catton (1899-1978) was best known for his two Civil War trilogies, The Army of the Potomac and The Centennial History of the Civil War. Born in Petoskey, he spent most of his childhood in Benzonia after his father accepted a teaching position at Benzonia Academy and became the academy's principal in 1906. The Cattons lived in this building, which served as the principal's home and the girls' dormitory. Catton served in the navy and worked for newspapers and the federal government before publishing his first Civil War book, Mr. Lincoln's Army, at the age of fifty-one. In 1954, he became the editor of American Heritage magazine and received the Pulitzer Prize for A Stillness at Appomattox. He died at his summer home in Frankfort, Michigan, in 1978. His fascination with the Civil War began in Benzonia, where he grew up among Civil War veterans whose presence shaped village life and his understanding of life itself. He admired their certainty, values, and faith in bravery, patriotism, freedom, and human progress, and later wrote that he was driven to restate that faith and show how it grew from what many young men on both sides felt, believed, and were brave enough to do. In the 1970s, he turned to writing about his native state in Waiting for the Morning Train, an account of the Michigan of his boyhood, and Michigan: A Bicentennial History.