Tony Horwitz is a native of WashingtonD.C. and a graduate of BrownUniversity and ColumbiaUniversity's Graduate School of Journalism. Horwitz has worked as a union organizer in rural Mississippi where he made a documentary for PBS about Southern timber workers. Horwitz lived overseas with his Australian wife for a decade and filed dispatches from forty countries, often as a war correspondent covering conflicts in the Persian Gulf, Sudan, Lebanon, Bosnia, and Northern Ireland. Horwitz has worked as a journalist for The Wall Street Journal and as a staff writer for The New Yorker and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Journalism in 1995 for a series on working conditions in low-wage America.

His previous books include One for The Road, the national bestseller Baghdad Without a Map and Confederates in the Attic, a national and New York Times bestseller. He lives in Virginia with his wife, the novelist Geraldine Brooks, and their son Nathaniel.