(Tribune News Service) — Growing up, Craig L. Symonds was always told you couldn't make money with a history degree.

Symonds, 76, has spent his career proving that thinking wrong, turning his passion for American history into a successful career as an award-winning author. This month, the former Naval Academy professor was recognized as the 2023 winner of the prestigious Pritzker Military Museum & Library Literature Award.

The honor recognizes a living author's body of work that enriches the understanding of military history and war, according to the Pritzker website.

"It's very validating," Symonds said. "You spend your life working on a particular thing, and then a community of fellow scholars say what you did was important, that it mattered. So, that of course makes me feel great."

In 2007, James M. McPherson received the first Pritzker award. Symonds is the 16th winner.

Last week, Symonds and his wife were flown to Chicago for the awards ceremony at the Palmer House Hotel, "a very swanky joint," by the author's description. The ceremony was held in conjunction with a symposium highlighting the 50 years since the U.S. last instituted a military draft in 1973.

"It was a great experience receiving this award," Symonds said. "They hosted the award in conjunction with a seminar highlighting the 50th anniversary of our volunteer military forces, so that was amazing just to remember it's been that long since they have done away with the draft."

The award is accompanied by a gold medal and $100,000 prize making it the second richest literary award, after the Nobel Prize in Literature.

This wasn't the first time Symonds' writing earned recognition. He is a decorated writer and recipient of many awards including five times being featured by the Book of the Month Club. He also won the Anne Arundel County Award for Literary Arts in 2006 and shared the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize in 2009 for his book "Lincoln and His Admirals: Abraham Lincoln, the U.S. Navy, and the Civil War." McPherson also won the Lincoln Prize that year.

Symonds' most recent book, released last year, is a wartime biography of Admiral Chester Nimitz called "Nimitz at War."

Born Dec. 31, 1946, in Long Beach, Calif., Symonds attended UCLA for his undergraduate degree before moving east to pursue graduate studies in history at the University of Florida.

"I was told you couldn't make any money doing history, and nobody would pay for that," he said. "I taught high school for a year or two, but because I wanted to teach at the college level, I went back to school to get my Ph.D."

Around 1970, Symonds received a draft notice during the Vietnam War, but due to his preference to be in the Navy, he decided to enlist rather than be drafted. He went to boot camp before heading to Officer Candidate School. From there, he attended the Naval War College in Newport, R.I., where he became a flag lieutenant to the president of the War College at the time, Vice Adm. Benedict Semmes.

In Symond's first year at the college, Semmes retired and was replaced by Adm. Stansfield Turner, who had a plan to change the curriculum.

Turner's plan was to change the format, minimizing uncompelling lectures by visiting "big shots" from Washington in favor of studying historical case studies of strategic decisions, Symonds said.

"So there I was, and even though I was only an ensign they took a chance on me and put me in charge of a class as a professor of strategy," Symonds said. "I was teaching captains and colonels as an ensign, and they kept me on an extra year."

He took that experience along with the time to finish his doctorate, which helped him retain a job as a civilian professor at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis.

"I recognize how fortunate I was for that circumstance because that position played a big role in the rest of my career," he said.

He went on to teach at the academy for 30 years, including a four-year term as chair of the history department. He was the first person to win both the academy's Teacher of the Year award in 1988 and Researcher of the Year in 1998.

Symonds has authored 17 books and edited and contributed to many more. His biographies on Civil War figures Joseph E. Johnston, Patrick Cleburne and Franklin Buchanan and books on World War II, such as “The Battle of Midway,” “Operation Neptune” and “World War II at Sea,” have all garnered praise. His 2005 book “Decision at Sea: Five Naval Battles that Shaped American History,” won the Theodore and Franklin D. Roosevelt Prize for Naval History.

"I love history, but I focused on the Civil War and World War II because to me the Civil War and World War II were the only two wars that America had to participate in," Symonds said. "The alternatives were not acceptable. Absent war, I just don't see how southerners would have let go of the institution of slavery. World War II had to happen because of the threat of Nazism."

On his retirement in 2005, Symonds was named an academy professor emeritus of history.

Now that Symonds has received the Pritzker prize, he could settle back at his home in Annapolis with his wife, where he's lived for almost 50 years. But he's already begun research on his next book, which will follow several students as they navigate their first years at the Naval Academy.

“After I write a book I’m exhausted, I’m never sure if it’s ready to be turned in,” Symonds said. “My ultimate goal is that the story is accurate and readable and an enlightening piece of history for the reader. I hope that when someone reads it and they finish, flop back in their chair and think, ‘Wow.’ “

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