David McCullough, who was known to millions as an award-winning, best-selling author and an appealing television host and narrator with a rare gift for recreating the great events and characters of America’s past, died on Sunday at his home in Hingham, Mass., southeast of Boston. He was 89.

The death was confirmed by his daughter Dorie Lawson. No specific cause was given.

Mr. McCullough won Pulitzer Prizes for two presidential biographies, “Truman” (1992) and “John Adams” (2001). He received National Book Awards for “The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal” (1977) and “Mornings on Horseback” (1981), about the young Theodore Roosevelt and his family.

Deep research and lively readability were hallmarks of his books, and so was their tendency to leap off the shelves. “Truman” topped The New York Times’s best-seller list for 43 weeks; “John Adams” was No. 1 in its first week and has since gone through dozens more printings.

His readers got a lot of work for their money: The Adams project took Mr. McCullough seven years, and “Truman” took him 10 (and when at last he showed his wife, Rosalee McCullough, the massive typescript, he said, she was amazed that it hadn’t taken longer). “The Great Bridge” (1972), his exhaustive account of the technology, personalities and politics involved in building the Brooklyn Bridge, was hailed as a monument in its own right. Yet there was hardly anything in his writing to suggest that he had ever staggered under the weight of his homework.

Critics saluted him as a literary master, adept at imbuing the familiar with narrative drama and bringing momentous events to life through small details and the accounts of individual witnesses. A prime example was his rendering of the Second Continental Congress in 1776, central to the Adams book, in which he captured not only the frustrating day-to-day wrangling over declaring independence as the British fleet approached, but also the sights and smells of a mucky Philadelphia summer, the quality of local architecture and local beers, and the contrasting personalities of two brilliant allies and future enemies.

“Jefferson was devoted to the ideal of improving mankind but had comparatively little interest in people in particular,” Mr. McCullough wrote. “Adams was not inclined to believe mankind improvable, but was certain it was important that human nature be understood.”

Thomas Jefferson, the shopaholic Virginia aristocrat, would confide that John Adams showed a certain “want of taste.” The frugal Adams, for his part, concluded that in Virginia “all geese are swans.”

“I think of writing history as an art form,” Mr. McCullough said in an interview for “Painting With Words,” a short 2008 documentary about him on HBO. “And I’m striving to write a book that might — might — qualify as literature. I don’t want it just to be readable. I don’t want it just to be interesting. I want it to be something that moves the reader. Moves me.”

He went a step further, inhabiting his characters like an actor preparing for a role. While writing “The Great Bridge,” he grew a beard, like the engineer Washington Roebling. Working on “Truman,” he formed the habit of taking brisk early morning walks, just as the president had done.

“People often ask me if I’m working on a book,” he said in an interview with The New York Times in 1992. “That’s not how I feel. I feel like I work in a book. It’s like putting myself under a spell. And this spell, if you will, is so real to me that if I have to leave my work for a few days, I have to work myself back into the spell when I come back. It’s almost like hypnosis.”