David Halberstam: 1934-2007

David Halberstam, the idiosyncratic Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author, died today in an automobile crash in California.

He was 73.

Halberstam is reported to have died of massive internal injuries at the scene of a three-vehicle collision in Menlo Park.

He was a passenger in the front seat of a car that was broadsided by another vehicle.

The coroner's office indicates he was wearing a seat belt.

Halberstam started his journalism career with a $46-a-week job at the Daily Times Leader in West Point, Mississippi.

In 1964, he won a Pulitzer Prize at age 30 for his reporting on the Vietnam War.

He became a profilic writer who credited his considerable productivity on refusing all unscheduled interruptions.

"Most of us who have survived here [in New York City] after a number of years have ironclad work rules," he once wrote in The New York Times. "Nothing interrupts us. Nothing .... We surface only at certain hours of the day."

Four years ago, Halberstam described his research techniques to an interviewer at Powell's - the famous Portland, Oregon book retailer:

"I take notes. I write in longhand as they talk. If they're going too fast, I try to slow them down. Then at the end of it, when the interview is over, I take the notes and I go back to my room or my home and I dictate the notes into a cassette. Then I have a friend who is retired type up the notes for me. It's great." Books by David Halberstam:

- (1961) The Noblest Roman - (1965) The Unfinished Odyssey of Robert Kennedy - (1965) The Making of a Quagmire: America and Vietnam during the Kennedy Era. McGraw-Hill. - (1967) One Very Hot Day - (1971) Ho

- (1972) The Best and the Brightest - (1979) The Powers That Be

- (1981) The Breaks of the Game - (1985) The Amateurs: The Story of Four Young Men and Their Quest for an Olympic Gold Medal - (1986) The Reckoning.

- (1989) Summer of '49 - (1991) The Next Century - (1993) The Fifties - (1994) October 1964. - (1999) The Children. - (1999) Playing for Keeps: Michael Jordan and the World He Made - (2001) War in a Time of Peace: Bush, Clinton, and the Generals - (2002) Firehouse - (2003) The Teammates: A Portrait of a Friendship - (2005) Bill Belichick: The Education of a Coach

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