Pulitzer Prize Winner Dead at 73

A Pulitzer Prize winner died yesterday in a car crash. David Halberstam, a renowned author and journalist, was 73. He was the passenger in a car traveling through Menlo Park, south of San Francisco, when his vehicle was broadsided by another car. The driver of the second car is a graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley. The grad student received only minor injuries in the collision. Mr. Halberstam, on the other hand, was declared dead at the scene.

His wife, Jean, has said that her husband wanted to be remembered as an historian, as well as for his "generosity to his peers and young people choosing the field of journalism." Halberstam began his career as a reporter for a small daily paper before moving on to the Tennesseean. Not long after, he became a correspondent for The New York Times, and was soon dispatched to the Vietnam War front in 1962. For his reporting on the war, Halberstam earned a shared Pulitzer Prize, though his writing from the front often rankled the U.S. government and military.

Halberstam was also an author. Between journalism and books, his writing covered a wide range of topics, from sports to the Vietnam War to the Civil Rights Movement.