Tony Horwitz was a native of Washington, D.C., and a graduate of Brown University and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. As a newspaper reporter he spent a decade overseas, mainly covering wars and conflict in the Middle East, Africa, and the Balkans for The Wall Street Journal. Returning to the U.S., he won the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting and wrote for The New Yorker before becoming a full-time author. His books include the national and New York Timesbestsellers, Confederates in the Attic, Blue Latitudes, Baghdad Without a Map and A Voyage Long and Strange. Midnight Rising was named a New York Times Notable Book in 2011 and one of the year’s ten best books by Library Journal. Tony was also a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and the president of the Society of American Historians. He died in May 2019, and is survived by his wife Geraldine Brooks and their two sons, Nathaniel and Bizu.
One of the Washington Post’s Notable Nonfiction Books of
2019 • One of NPR's Best Books of 2019
“Timely . . . A valuable work that combines biography, history and
travelogue. . . . Horwitz is a smooth writer and an even better
reporter (hardly surprising, given that he won a Pulitzer Prize for
reporting at The Wall Street Journal), and he recounts his travels
with insight interspersed with humor, as well as with an
intermittent raising of the eyebrows at numerous oddities and
occasional evils.” —The New York Times Book Review
“In Horwitz’s writing, past and present collide and march together
on almost every page, prying our minds open with the absurdity,
hilarity and humanity we encounter. Olmsted spent nine months
traveling 4,000 miles and then wrote hundreds of pages about it;
Horwitz spent two years revisiting his paths, his ideas and his
psyche, capturing the story in 414 pages of sparkling prose.”
—David Blight, The Washington Post
“A compelling report on the state of our present disunion.” —Wall
Street Journal
“I've been waiting for Tony Horwitz to write another big
on-the-road book that crisscrosses the American cultural divide . .
. Spying on the South is every bit as enlightening and alive with
detail, absurdity and colorful characters as Confederates in the
Attic was.” —NPR
“He was the rare historian—the only historian I can think
of—equally at home in the archive and in an interview, a dedicated
scholar, a devoted journalist.” —Jill Lepore, The New Yorker
“Horwitz’s excellence as a writer and reporter unearths forgotten
chapters of history while making fascinating present-day
discoveries.” —The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“Horwitz is an amiable narrator who marries a journalist’s knack
for scene-setting and chatting folks up with the ability to tell a
good historical tale.” —BookPage
“A tour is only as good as its guide, and Horwitz is a seasoned
one—inquisitive, open-minded, and opting for observation over
judgment, whether at a dive bar, monster truck rally, the Creation
Museum, or a historical plantation. The book will appeal to fans of
travelogue, Civil War–era history, and current events by way of
Southern sensibilities.” —Booklist
“Horwitz brings humor, curiosity, and care to capturing the voices
of the larger-than-life characters he encounters. A huge canvas of
intricate details, this thoughtful and observant work delicately
navigates the long shadow of America’s history.” —Publishers Weekly
(starred review)
“With the keen eye and deft pen that he's long brought to telling
the odd and wonderful and fascinating story of America,
Tony Horwitz has returned to familiar territory—the South—to give
us a unique piece of reportage from a region that tells us a whole
lot more about the country than the country sometimes wants to
admit. Like his classic Confederates in the Attic, this book will
be read, remembered, and treasured.” —Jon Meacham,
Pulitzer-Prize-winning historian and author of The Soul of
America
“Tony Horwitz’s reporting is fearless and persistent and
inspired—and it produces views of America like no one else’s.
Spying on the South kept me turning the pages to see what
frightening and funny revelation was coming next. An important book
for our almost unprecedented moment in history.” —Ian Frazier,
author of Great Plains and Travels in Siberia
“In the long dark years before the Civil War, Frederick Law Olmsted
toured the South by stage, by boat, by train, and by foot,
reporting on a nation unraveling. Tony Horwitz does much more than
follow in Olmsted’s footsteps in this searching travel narrative:
he chronicles an American agony, the pain of division, the anguish
of uncertainty. But he finds, too, an enduring American spirit of
generosity, and commonweal, and curiosity.” —Jill Lepore, author of
These Truths: A History of the United States
“Two journeys, a hundred and sixty years apart, remind us that
history doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme. In the midst of
our country’s long-overdue reckoning with symbols of white
supremacy, Tony Horwitz retraces the steps of America’s greatest
landscape architect, Frederick Law Olmsted, whose encounters with
slavery forced him to rethink the role of civic spaces in the
American experiment. Horwitz brings home a magnificent account of
who we have been and what we might still become.” —Henry Louis
Gates, Jr., author of Stony the Road
“Having grown up amidst the Emerald Necklace, having lived off the
northern fringes of Central Park and later the western edge of its
rangier cousin, Prospect, and having read Devil In the White City,
I truly did not know there were any more astonishments left in the
life of Frederick Law Olmsted. Leave it to the incomparable Tony
Horwitz to reveal Olmsted’s secret life as a journalistic
super-spy, peering not merely into the burgeoning Confederacy, but,
as Horowitz poignantly observes, a cultural divide with which we
are still reckoning.” —John Hodgman, author of Vacationland
“In the 1850s, Yankees saw the South as a foreign country and the
New York Times sent Frederick Law Olmsted on an undercover mission
to interpret it for readers. It was a daring and inspired move, and
so is Tony Horwitz’s retracing of Olmsted’s path from the Potomac
to the Rio Grande. Spoiler alert, things don’t always go well for
our dauntless guide, but they sure do for the reader. This is one
of the smartest, funniest, and most illuminating books about the
South and Texas, and about our own divided times, I’ve had the
pleasure to read.” —Bryan Burrough, author of Forget the Alamo and
Days of Rage, The Big Rich and Public Enemies
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