David Macaulay was born on December 2, 1946, in Lancashire, England. After moving to Bloomfield, New Jersey, at age eleven and beginning to draw seriously, he attended high school in Cumberland, Rhode Island, until 1964, when he graduated and began college at the Rhode Island School of Design. He spent his fifth year at RISD studying in Rome, Herculaneum, and Pompeii, and he then recieved his bacherlor's degree in architecture.
He published his first book, Cathedral, in 1973, after a brief period of teaching and designing in various positions. Cathedral, a pen-and-ink illustrated history of the constuction of a typical Gothic cathedral, launched a series of similar works, including City (1974), Pyramid (1975), Underground (1976), Castle (1977), Unbuilding (1980), Mill (1983), and Mosque (2003). Macaulay was also the illustrator for The Way Things Work (1988, text by Neil Ardley), for which he provided humorous and ingenious drawings.
Macaulay has received numerous awards for his works, including the Caldecott Medal Award for his book, Black and White (1990), the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award, the Christopher Award, an American Institute of Architects Medal, the Washington Children's Book Guild Nonfiction Award, and two Hans Christian Anderson Award nominations. Cathedral, Castle, and Pyramid have been turned into PBS television programs, which Macaulay hosted, and his books, translated into a dozen languages, have sold over 2 million copies in the United States alone. David Macaulay now lives in Rhode Island with his family.
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