A short life of the author
Tony Horwitz (1958–2019) was born on 9 June 1958 in Washington, D.C. He studied at Brown University and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. He worked as a foreign correspondent for the Wall Street Journal in the Middle East and Australia and won the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting in 1995 for his investigation of working conditions in low-wage American industries. He died on 27 May 2019.
Life and Career
One for the Road (1987) — about hitchhiking across Australia — was his first book. Baghdad Without a Map (1991) collected his Middle East journalism.
Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War (1998) — in which Horwitz traveled across the American South embedding with Civil War re-enactors, visiting battlefields and Confederate monuments, and talking to people for whom the war is not history but a living, contested present — is his masterwork. It revealed how Americans use the Civil War to process identity, race, and regional grievance.
Blue Latitudes (2002) retraced Captain Cook’s voyages. A Voyage Long and Strange (2008) explored the centuries of American history between Columbus and Plymouth Rock. Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War (2011) was a narrative history. Spying on the South (2019, published posthumously) retraced Frederick Law Olmsted’s 1850s journey through the slave states.
Key Works
- Confederates in the Attic (1998)
- Midnight Rising (2011)
- A Voyage Long and Strange (2008)
Collecting Horwitz
Confederates in the Attic (1998, Pantheon) brings $15–$40.