David Halberstam, 1935-2007

A literary light of the 20th and 21st centuries has been extinguished.

Pulitzer Prize-winning author, historian and journalist David Halberstam was killed in a car crash yesterday in Menlo Park, California.

Halberstam graduated in 1955 from Harvard, where he was managing editor of the Harvard Crimson.

The year before the Supreme Court had ruled in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, and Halberstam headed south.

He was fired from his first job as a reporter at the West Point (Miss.) Daily Times-Leader. He joined the Nashville Tennessean, then the New York Times.

In 1964 Halberstam won the Pulitzer Prize for his reports from Vietnam, and the rest, as they say, is history.

For history is what he gave us – with, as one Washinton Post reviewer put it, “an ivestigator’s skill and a novelist’s flair.”

Any of Halberstam’s books is worth the read, but I personally recommend “The Best and the Brightest” and “The Fifties.” His bibliography:

1961: The Noblest Roman. Houghton-Mifflin.
1965: The Making of a Quagmire: America and Vietnam during the Kennedy Era. McGraw-Hill.
1967: One Very Hot Day. Houghton-Mifflin.
1968: The Unfinished Odyssey of Robert Kennedy. Random House.
1971: Ho. McGraw-Hill.
1972: The Best and the Brightest. Ballantine Books.
1979: The Powers That Be. University of Illinois Press.
1981: The Breaks of the Game. Ballantine Books.
1985: The Amateurs: The Story of Four Young Men and Their Quest for an Olympic Gold Medal. Ballantine Books.
1986: The Reckoning. Avon Books.
1989: Summer of '49. Harper Perennial Modern Classics.
1991: The Next Century. Random House.
1993: The Fifties. Ballantine Books.
1994: October 1964. Ballantine Books.
1999: The Children. Ballantine Books.
1999: Playing for Keeps: Michael Jordan and the World He Made. Broadway Books. 2001: War in a Time of Peace: Bush, Clinton, and the Generals. Scribner.
2002: Firehouse. Hyperion.
2003: The Teammates: A Portrait of a Friendship. Hyperion.
2005: Bill Belichick: The Education of a Coach. Hyperion.
2007: Work in progress: at the time of his death was working on a book about the Korean War.

New York Times obituary, reviews of his books and his Pulitzer Prize reporting from the NYT archives: LINK