Tony Horwitz, prominent journalist and best-selling author. (Confederates in the Attic, Blue Latitudes)
He was only 60.
“Last week I saw my cardiologist,” Mr. Horwitz wrote in The Times last month. “He told me I drink too much.”
Mr. Horwitz acknowledged his occupational hazard, but made a case for what he called bar-stool democracy. His sojourn in the South, he said, had him discarding stereotypes and seeing blue-collar conservatives as “the three-dimensional individuals I drank and debated with in factory towns, Gulf Coast oil fields and distressed rural crossroads.”
He expressed the hope that they would remember him not as “one of those ‘coastal elites’ dripping with contempt and condescension toward Middle America,” he wrote, but “rather, as that guy from ‘up north’ who appeared on the next bar stool one Friday after work, asked about their job and life and hopes for the future, and thought what they said was important enough to write down.”