New Orleans ? Stephen E. Ambrose, a once-obscure history professor catapulted to prominence by his best-selling books that made aging World War II veterans hometown heroes again, died Sunday of lung cancer. He was 66.

Family members were with Ambrose, a longtime smoker who was diagnosed in April, when he died at a Bay St. Louis, Miss., hospital, said his son, Hugh.

At the National D-Day Museum, which Ambrose founded, his portrait was placed near the entrance and a sign noted his death. Guests were invited to write messages to the Ambrose family on museum postcards.

“He had a knack in his writing for making you feel like he was sitting right there talking to you,” said Tom Gordon, a P-38 reconnaissance pilot in World War II, who was visiting the museum from St. Louis.

Douglas Brinkley, a former student of Ambrose’s who followed him as director of the University of New Orleans’ Eisenhower Center, said Ambrose was “the great populist historian of America.

“He didn’t write for intellectuals, he wrote for everyday people,” Brinkley said.

Some in academia didn’t take Ambrose seriously, which is why, his supporters say, jealousy ran rampant when Ambrose’s name became a fixture on best-seller lists. Some colleagues say that was what led to accusations in early 2002 that Ambrose plagiarized several passages in a handful of books. The passages lacked quotation marks, but were footnoted, which other historians called inadequate.

Ambrose apologized for careless editing but otherwise stood by his work.

“I always thought plagiarism meant using other people’s words and ideas, pretending they were your own and profiting from it. I do not do that, have never done that and never will,” he wrote in a newspaper editorial.

Ambrose spent the last six months of his life in a flurry of writing. His last book, “To America: Personal Reflections of an Historian,” which he called his love song to his country, is set for release Nov. 19.

Catapult to fame

Stephen Ambrose, historian and founder of the National D-Day Museum, gestures as he thanks former President George Bush during ceremonies at the museum Dec. 7, 2001, in New Orleans. At left is actor Tom Hanks, with whom Ambrose worked on Saving

For much of his career, Ambrose was a little-known history professor. He burst onto the best-seller list less than a decade ago with his 1994 book “D-Day June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II.”

Based in large part on interviews with veterans, the book recounted the chaotic, bloody beach invasions of Normandy from the American soldier’s perspective.

“He was saying, ‘There’s all this obsession with high command, but the real story is these citizen soldiers who still live in every town and hamlet in the United States,”‘ Brinkley said.

With unadorned but lively prose, Ambrose continued to captivate readers as he churned out history books at an industrious pace, publishing more than 30, including a half-dozen more best sellers such as “Citizen Soldiers” and “The Wild Blue.”

He “combined high standards of scholarship with the capacity to make history come alive for a lay audience,” Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Arthur Schlesinger said.

While best known for his World War II books and as the founder of the National D-Day Museum, Ambrose wrote about numerous aspects of American history. Other books addressed former Presidents Eisenhower and Nixon, the Transcontinental Railroad and the Lewis and Clark expedition of the American West.

Focus on WWII

Ambrose, who called himself a hero worshipper, said in a recent interview that his focus on World War II developed from working on his Eisenhower biography and his memory of GI’s returning home from World War II when he was 10 years old.

“I thought the returning veterans were giants who had saved the world from barbarism. I still think so,” he said.

For the most part, war veterans were eager to help Ambrose and entrusted artifacts they saved from World War II to the D-Day Museum. The old soldiers seemed to relate well to the author, a plain-speaking man who got to the point and wasn’t afraid to mix in a few curse words for emphasis.

Ambrose’s film work included consulting roles in Steven Spielberg’s World War II blockbuster, “Saving Private Ryan,” and on the World War II documentary, “Price for Peace,” also directed by Spielberg.

In addition, Spielberg and “Private Ryan” star Tom Hanks turned Ambrose’s best-selling book “Band of Brothers” into a cable miniseries.

Stint at KSU

Ambrose was born Jan. 10, 1936, a doctor’s son from Whitewater, Wis. He was for much of his career a ponytail-wearing liberal who once quit a teaching job at Kansas State University in protest over a campus visit by Nixon during the bombings of Laos and Cambodia.

As a young professor, Ambrose counted himself among the New Left professors who taught what was wrong with America, criticizing the treatment of American Indians, U.S. motives for the Mexican-American war and neglect of the environment.

Ambrose spoke out against America’s involvement in the Vietnam War, yet he focused his research on presidents and the military at a time when such topics were increasingly regarded by his colleagues as old-fashioned.

Ambrose’s cancer diagnosis prompted him to drop a World War II project about the Pacific and begin the autobiographical book. The book in many ways embodied Ambrose’s transformation from left-wing demonstrator to super-patriot.

“I want to tell all the things that are right about America,” Ambrose said in a May interview with The Associated Press.

Ambrose, who spent most of his teaching career at the University of New Orleans, founded the D-Day Museum to exhibit artifacts entrusted to him by veterans he had interviewed. It initially was meant for the university campus but turned into a $30 million exhibit in a converted downtown warehouse.