Boston Book Festival 2019

Beloved reporter, historian, author, and friend Tony Horwitz died suddenly shortly after the publication of his latest book, Spying on the South: An Odyssey Across the American Divide. In that work, Tony followed the path through the American South of Frederick Law Olmsted, who, before he became a renowned landscape architect, was an undercover correspondent for the New York Times. Tony explored the racial and political divides plaguing the United States, using a perch on a barstool to find his informants. As always, his reportage is infused with his trademark humor in the face of things a Massachusetts Yankee finds difficult to hear. An all-star panel of Tony’s friends and colleagues will discuss Tony’s life and work. Join Harvard historian and lawyer Annette Gordon-Reed, author of The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family, which was awarded a Pulitzer Prize; Yale historian David W. Blight, whose Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for history; and Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Ron Suskind, a former Wall Street Journal colleague of Tony’s and author of Life Animated, Hope in the Unseen, and The Way of the World, for a tribute to Tony Horwitz.