Tony Horwitz was a graduate of Brown University and Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. He was a native of Washington, D.C. He spent a decade as a newspaper correspondent in the Middle East, Africa, and the Balkans, primarily reporting conflicts and violence for The Wall Street Journal. When he returned to the United States, he earned the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting and worked for The New Yorker before deciding to pursue writing full-time. Confederates in the Attic, Blue Latitudes, Baghdad Without a Map, and A Journey Long and Weird are among his national and New York Times bestsellers. In 2011, the New York Times designated Midnight Rising a Notable Book, and Library Journal named it one of the top ten books of the year.

Tony was also the president of the Society of American Historians and a fellow at Harvard University's Radcliffe Center for Advanced Study. His wife Geraldine Brooks and their two kids Nathaniel and Bizu survive him. He died in May 2019.