In Spying on the South, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author Tony Horwitz returns to the South and the Civil War era. This time, he is retracing the steps taken by Frederick Law Olmsted.
Olmsted is best known as the visionary behind some of our country’s most iconic urban parks, including Central Park in New York and Prospect Park in New Jersey, which he designed to bring together people of diverse classes and backgrounds. However, before his legendary career as a landscape architect, Olmsted was a restless farmer in search of adventure. In 1852, he convinced the editor of the paper that would become The New York Times to pay him $300 to travel the American South and report his observations regarding slavery’s effects on the region. Olmsted’s observations culminated in 64 dispatches for the Times, as well as three books.
Spying on the South is as full of detail and colorful characters as Horwitz’s Confederates in the Attic, and his award-winning writing certainly shines through. However, this book strikes a more somber chord. Following Olmsted’s 1852-54 journey, from Appalachia, down the Mississippi River, into bayou Louisiana, and across the Texas border into Mexico, Horwitz discovered a region that still faces discord and divide. Hoping to find a beautiful revelation to share, Horwitz struggled to write the book. As Horwitz noted in his dispatches, a century and a half after the Civil War, people still seem to hate one another as much as ever, hurtling racist remarks and tweets “as barbed and blood-soaked as bayonets.”
Publisher: Penguin Press (May 14, 2019)
About the Author
Tony Horwitz was a native of Washington, D.C., and a graduate of Brown University and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. As a foreign correspondent, he covered wars and conflict in the Middle East, Africa, and Eastern Europe, mainly for the Wall Street Journal. Returning to the U.S., he won a Pulitzer Prize for national reporting and wrote for the New Yorker. His books include the national bestsellers Confederates in the Attic, Blue Latitudes, Baghdad Without a Map, and A Voyage Long and Strange. Horwitz passed away on May 27, 2019, just two weeks after the release of Spying on the South.