Award-winning author and historian Gordon S. Wood has tragically died aged 92 after being hit by a vehicle in Rhode Island. The professor at Brown University died on Sunday after being hit by a car in a supermarket car park, according to East Providence Police and his daughter, Amy Louise Wood, who is a historian at Illinois State University. Officers said Gordon was taken to Rhode Island Hospital with serious injuries, from which he later died.

During his highly successful career, the acclaimed author wrote The Creation of the American Republic and The Radicalism of the American Revolution. Gordon, who published many books throughout his life, was presented with the National Humanities Medal “for scholarship that provides insight into the founding of the nation and the drafting of the US Constitution" by former President Barack Obama in 2011.

The author's name was also familiar to film fans through the Oscar-winning Robbin Williams' movie, Good Will Hunting, which was released in 1997.

Within the film, a self-taught genius played by Matt Damon taunts a Harvard undergraduate by saying: "You're gonna be in here regurgitating Gordon Wood, talking about, you know, the pre-revolutionary utopia and the capital-forming effects of military mobilisation." Gordon would later point out he did not endorse these ideas.

“That’s my two seconds of fame," he told the Los Angeles Review of Books in 2015. “More kids know about that than any of the books I have written.”

Tributes have been pouring in following Gordon's death, with his works, according to the Washington Post obituary published on Monday, "considered benchmarks of intellectual and social historiography” that helped reshape America’s origin story in the years after the Second World War.

Someone penned on X: "Today we mourn the loss of Gordon S. Wood, one of the most influential historians of the American founding, a treasured friend and longtime partner of the National Constitution Centre."

Another said: "Heartbroken by news of Gordon Wood’s awful death. He was a gem of a man and a towering historian whose profound teachings about the Revolution will shape how we see ourselves for centuries to come."

Brown University said: "For nearly 40 years at Brown, Gordon S. Wood helped shape the study of early American history through his teaching, mentorship and award-winning scholarship. The Pulitzer Prize-winning historian leaves an extraordinary legacy at Brown and far beyond, influencing generations of students, scholars and readers."