The world of literary journalism lost one of the greats last week. Tony Horwitz, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author, died May 27, 2019, at age 60.
Horwitz was a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. He is best known for what he called “participatory history” books about a variety of topics: the Confederate cultural legacy in the South; the voyages of Captain James Cook; the poultry industry in the South. The first-person accounts of his adventures abroad make you laugh, or scare you to death, or both.
He wrote for the New Yorker and the Wall Street Journal, where he won the Pulitzer in 1995, but a longtime friend commented that Horwitz was always more comfortable on the move and was confident that he would find something interesting to write on the road. Here’s a partial list that proves he was right:
Baghdad Without a Map, and Other Misadventures in Arabia (1991) , a startling close-up of a volatile region few Westerners understand, delivered with wit and insight
Confederates in the Attic (1998) , a look at modern-day southern attitudes about the Civil War and its reenactors
A Voyage Long and Strange (2008), which explores North America in the 132 years between Columbus and the Pilgrims’ arrival
Midnight Rising (2011), the true, mostly unknown story of the men and women who launched a desperate strike at the slaveholding South, in John Brown’s 1859 uprising
His last book—released two weeks before his death—was about 19th-century landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted. He dedicated Spying on the South to his wife, Pulitzer prize-winning novelist Geraldine Brooks, “the architect of my landscape, in love, life and work.” As Horwitz told the Birmingham News in 2008, “Nothing goes out of the house without the other one having read it carefully. We’ve been doing that for over 20 years now.”
In his own words: “I hope they occasionally remember me…as that guy from “up north” who appeared on the next bar stool one Friday after work, asked about their job and life and hopes for the future, and thought what they said was important enough to write down.”
Tony Horwitz is survived by Geraldine, their two sons, and many devoted readers.