Horwitz, Pulitzer Price winner at WSJ, dies at 60

Tony Horwitz

Tony Horwitz, whose vivid stories about working-class Americans won him a Pulitzer Prize at The Wall Street Journal before he became a best-selling history author, died at age 60.

William Power of The Journal writes, “A Northerner with a deep fascination for the South, Mr. Horwitz is remembered as one of the most talented Journal writers of the past 35 years. In addition to covering wars as a foreign correspondent, he won the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting in 1995 for articles about working conditions in low-wage America.

“His Dec. 1, 1994, first-person Page One article, about working in a poultry slaughterhouse in Mississippi, began:

“They call it ‘the chain,’ a swift steel shackle that shuttles dead chickens down a disassembly line of hangers, skinners, gut-pullers and gizzard-cutters. The chain has been rattling at 90 birds a minute for nine hours when the woman working feverishly beside me crumples onto a pile of drumsticks.

“‘No more,’ she whimpers. A foreman with a stopwatch around his neck rushes up. ‘Come on now,’ he bellows. ‘Pump it up!'”

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Chris Roush

Chris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.