Tony Horwitz

He was born in Washington, D.C., the son of Norman Harold Horwitz, a neurosurgeon, and Elinor Lander Horwitz, a writer. Horwitz was an alumnus of Sidwell Friends School, in Washington, D.C. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa as a history major from Brown University and received a master's degree at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

Horwitz won a 1994 James Aronson Award and the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for his stories about working conditions in low-wage America published in The Wall Street Journal. He also worked as a staff writer for The New Yorker and as a foreign correspondent covering conflicts in Africa, Europe, and the Middle East.

He documented his venture into e-publishing and reaching best-seller status in that venue in an opinion article for The New York Times.

In 2019 he began writing and lecturing for the Gertrude Polk Brown Lecture Series at The Filson Historical Society. His book Spying on the South: An Odyssey Across the American Divide focuses on the early New York Times journalist and correspondent Frederick Law Olmsted's travels through the American South from 1852 to 1857.

He was a fellow at the Radcliffe College Center of Advanced Study and a past president of the Society of American Historians. In 2020 it established the Tony Horwitz Prize honoring distinguished work in American history of wide appeal and enduring public significance.

Horwitz married the Australian writer Geraldine Brooks in France in 1984. They had two children. His son Nathaniel Horwitz co-founded Hunterbrook and Mayday Health.

On May 27, 2019, Horwitz collapsed while walking in Chevy Chase, Maryland. He was taken to George Washington University Hospital, the same hospital where he was born, and pronounced dead; the cause was cardiac arrest due to myocarditis. He was in the midst of a book tour for Spying on the South.