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| Tony Horwitz | |
Tony Horwitz, the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and bestselling author "known for embedding himself in the worlds he wrote about, whether joining a slaughterhouse assembly line or an army of Confederate battlefield re-enactors," died on Monday, the New York Times reported. He was 60 and collapsed suddenly while walking in Chevy Chase, Md., apparently suffering cardiac arrest. He was in the Washington area on tour for his latest book, Spying on the South: An Odyssey Across the American Divide, published two weeks ago by Penguin Press, and was going to appear at an event last night at Politics & Prose.
Horwitz was probably best known for Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War (1998). His other books included 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). He was married for 35 years to Geraldine Brooks, author of, among other books, Year of Wonders, March and People of the Book.
"Tony created his own unique genre of history and journalism in book after book," said David William Blight, a professor of American history at Yale and director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition. Speaking about Spying on the South, which retraces a 6,000-mile journey Frederick Law Olmsted took in the South in the 1850s reporting for the New York Times, he noted that Horwitz's "search for Olmsted's journey was Tony's own brilliant mirror held up to all of us about the awful social and political sicknesses we face now as Olmsted's epic journey showed the same for the South and the road to the Civil War."
"He was easily bored with conventional explanations, and his restlessness led him to places a normal person wouldn't get to," said author and financial journalist Michael Lewis, who recalled that Horwitz was driven by an antic energy and unquenchable curiosity.
In an April Times op-ed piece headlined "Can Bar-Stool Democracy Save America?", Horwitz wrote that part of the research for his latest book involved "trailing Olmsted from the Potomac to the Rio Grande. To get my bearings, I often stopped first at a chamber of commerce or small-town newspaper office. But my best sources were cultivated after hours, at dive bars and pool halls.... Wandering into red-state Southern bars with a reporter's notebook, to quiz drinkers about race or guns or immigration, isn't always a walk in an Olmsted-designed park....
"But I can count such hostile receptions on one hand. In almost every other instance, I've been met affably, by drinkers open about their views and curious to know mine, as a visiting writer from 'Taxachusetts'.... Now that I'm back home in Massachusetts, I listen differently when I hear comments that cast blue-collar conservatives as some sort of alien, monolithic species. I conjure instead the three-dimensional individuals I drank and debated with in factory towns, Gulf Coast oil fields and distressed rural crossroads."
While on the Wall Street Journal's staff, he won the 1995 Pulitzer for national reporting "for his vivid accounts of grim working conditions in low-wage jobs, including those at garbage recycling and poultry processing plants." Horwitz later wrote for the New Yorker on the Middle East "before amplifying his brand of participatory journalism in nonfiction books."