Tony Horwitz

Tony Horwitz was born in Washington DC in 1958, graduated from Columbia Journalism School, and worked as a foreign correspondent for the Wall Street Journal — covering the Gulf War, Bosnia, and Somalia — before turning to the American history that obsessed him.

Confederates in the Attic (1998) is his most celebrated book — a year spent with Civil War re-enactors, Confederate descendants, and the communities of the American South that still live intimately with the war's legacy. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award and is still the best single account of what the Civil War means to the people who cannot leave it alone.

Blue Latitudes (2002) followed the routes of Captain James Cook's voyages — South Pacific, Australia, Hawaii — asking what had survived and what had been destroyed by the contact Cook initiated. It is a model of the historical travel book: the present landscape read against the past event, each illuminating the other.

A Voyage Long and Strange (2008) is about the un-famous Europeans who came to America between Columbus and the Pilgrims — the Spanish, French, and English explorers who found the continent and then failed to hold it — and how Americans today relate to their pre-Pilgrim past.

He died suddenly of a heart attack in 2019 while attending a literary event in Washington. He was 60.