Tony Horwitz, ‘Confederates in the Attic’ Author, Dead at 60

Tony Horwitz, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, historian and author whose books have graced best-seller lists and college syllabuses, has died at the age of 60. His publisher confirmed to NPR that he died Monday without warning, suffering an apparent cardiac arrest while in Washington, D.C., on tour for his most recent book.

The book, Spying on the South, had been released just two weeks ago.

The writer won the Pulitzer for national reporting in 1995 for his work with The Wall Street Journal, covering working conditions for low-wage employees in the U.S. The stories took him from Mississippi to Maryland to Iowa. But he'd already done a lot of travelling for his own work before that.

In One for the Road, published in 1987, a young Horwitz wrote of his grueling journey hitchhiking across 7,000 miles of the Australian Outback, and roughly two decades later, he retraced the steps of the early European settlers along the east coast of the U.S. in A Voyage Long and Strange.

"I think part of what I wanted to do is restore a little bit of the unpredictability to history," Horwitz told NPR's Melissa Block shortly after the book's publication in 2008. "It didn't have to unfold this way, it could well have gone very differently."