Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and acclaimed nonfiction author Tony Horwitz died earlier this week at age 60. He was in Washington, D.C., on tour for his latest book, Spying on the South: An Odyssey Across the American Divide, when he collapsed suddenly. He is survived by his wife, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Geraldine Brooks (Year of Wonders, March, People of the Book), and two children.
Horwitz won the 1995 Pulitzer for National Reporting for his Wall Street Journal articles about poor working conditions in low-wage jobs across America. He was also a New Yorker staff writer and foreign correspondent in war zones across the Middle East and Africa. Horwitz is perhaps best known for Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War (1998), in which he travels the South and participates in reenactments to explore the Civil War's lingering legacy. His other books include Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before (2002), A Voyage Long and Strange: Rediscovering the New World (2008), and Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War (2011). Spying on the South retraces the 6,000-mile journey of Frederick Law Olmsted, the New York Times journalist who later designed Central Park, across the 1850s South. It is available from Penguin Press ($30, 9781101980286). --Tobias Mutter
