David Halberstam launched his career at the smallest daily newspaper in Mississippi, worked his way up to the New York Times, won a Pulitzer Prize for reporting from Vietnam and then turned to longer-form writing, part of a generation of reporters who started as journalists but in mid-career became historians. His 2002 bestseller, War in a Time of Peace, was a runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize in non-fiction. He wrote 21 books covering such diverse topics as the Vietnam War, Civil Rights, the auto industry and a baseball pennant race.