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Learn moreA New York Times Notable Book for 2011
A Library Journal Top Ten Best Books of 2011
A Boston Globe Best Nonfiction Book of 2011
Bestselling author Tony Horwitz tells the electrifying tale of the daring insurrection that put America on the path to bloody war
Plotted in secret, launched in the dark, John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry was a pivotal moment in U.S. history. But few Americans know the true story of the men and women who launched a desperate strike at the slaveholding South. Now, Midnight Rising portrays Brown's uprising in vivid color, revealing a country on the brink of explosive conflict.
Brown, the descendant of New England Puritans, saw slavery as a sin against America's founding principles. Unlike most abolitionists, he was willing to take up arms, and in 1859 he prepared for battle at a hideout in Maryland, joined by his teenage daughter, three of his sons, and a guerrilla band that included former slaves and a dashing spy. On October 17, the raiders seized Harpers Ferry, stunning the nation and prompting a counterattack led by Robert E. Lee. After Brown's capture, his defiant eloquence galvanized the North and appalled the South, which considered Brown a terrorist. The raid also helped elect Abraham Lincoln, who later began to fulfill Brown's dream with the Emancipation Proclamation, a measure he called "a John Brown raid, on a gigantic scale."
Tony Horwitz's riveting book travels antebellum America to deliver both a taut historical drama and a telling portrait of a nation dividedโa time that still resonates in ours.
Tony Horwitz is a native of Washington, D.C., and a graduate of Brown University and Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. He worked for many years as a reporter, first in Indiana and then during a decade overseas in Australia, Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, mostly covering wars and conflicts as a foreign correspondent for The Wall Street Journal. After returning to the States, he won the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting and worked as a staff writer for The New Yorker before becoming a full-time author.
His books include Midnight Rising, A Voyage Long and Strange, Blue Latitudes, a national and New York Times bestseller about the Pacific voyages of Captain James Cook, Baghdad Without a Map, a national bestseller about the Middle East, and Confederates in the Attic, a national and New York Times bestseller about the Civil War.
Horwitz has been a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and a visiting scholar at the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University. He lives with his wife, Geraldine Brooks, and their son, Nathaniel, on the island of Martha's Vineyard in Massachusetts.
Dan Oreskes is a skillful narrator whose first audiobook, The House of Scorta, received an AudioFile Earphones Award. He was also a narrator in the Audie-nominated audio book American Gods: The Tenth Anniversary Edition. His other narration credits include Midnight Rising by Tony Horwitz and Suite Francaise by Irene Nerimovsky, an Earphones Award-winner. Oreskes is also a talented stage actor, with credits both on Broadway ("Aida", "Electra") and off (Arthur Millerโs โMr. Peterโs Connectionsโ).
Reviews
โA hard-driving narrative of one of America's most troubling figuresโฆ Horwitz describes the disaster in riveting termsโฆ It's impossible to read this fine book without thinking about modern-day Browns.โ โKevin Boyle, The New York Times Book Review (a New York Times Notable Book, 2011)
โHorwitz's skills are a good match for this enormously compelling character, and his well-paced narrative incorporates masterful sketches of Brown's family, foot soldiers, financial backers, admirers and prosecutorsโฆ The result is both page-turning and heartbreaking--a book to engage mind and soul.โ โThe Boston Globe
โHorwitz, an exceptionally skilled and accomplished journalist, here turns his hand to pure history with admirable results. Midnight Rising is smoothly written, thoroughly researched, places Brown within the context of his time and place, and treats him sensitively but scarcely adoringly.โ โThe Washington Post(Best of 2011, Notable Work of Nonfiction)
โMidnight Rising is a richly detailed and engaging historyโฆ Horwitz's moment-by-moment account of the doomed raid unfolds with such immediacy that he reintroduces suspense to a story we all know from textbooks.โ โThe San Francisco Chronicle
โHorwitz describes guerrilla action and the run-up to war with a deadline writer's immediacyโฆ A brilliant researcher, he integrates diverse sources into a cogent adventure.โ โThe Washington Times
โWhat do you call John Brown? Is he a terrorist or a freedom fighter? ... Tony Horwitz settles upon the word insurgent -- and the label seems just right, as does Horwitz's book as a wholeโฆโ โSeattle Times
โIn captivating detail, Horwitz animates the wild-eyed, long-bearded crusader . . . Make no mistake, the infamous October 1859 raid on the federal armory at Harpers Ferry by John Brown and his 18 men was the stone that began the avalanche that became the Civil Wars.โ โThe Cleveland Plain Dealer
โA brave and highly successful attempt to revive the legend of Brown's martyrdom for the 21st century readerโฆ. Horwitz's vivid writing styleโฆ makes for a superb historical narrative.โ โBuffalo News
โA beautifully crafted, richly detailed, and riveting narrative of a pivotal episode in American history . . . Midnight Rising is at its best reconstructing the lives (and deaths) of the relatively anonymous conspirators โ especially the African-Americans.โ โThe Florida Courier
โHorwitz's potent prose delivers the facts of this bellwether incident in riveting fashionโฆ It is an absorbing portrait of the often frustrated but passionately driven firebrand who successfully convinced a country of the shame of slavery and, to the South's great regret, earned martyr status in the aftermath of his execution. Brown qualifies as America's first important post-revolution terrorist...โ โBookpage
โHorwitz's description of the little band of idealists and adventurers who signed on for Brown's offensive โ including five black men and two of Brown's own sons โ is both fascinating and touching. His careful recreation of the bloody events of October 16, 1859, the day of Brown's disastrous raid on Harpers Ferry, is both suspenseful and heartwrenching.โ โChristian Science Monitor (one of the 15 Best Nonfiction Books of 2011)
โIn Midnight Rising, [Horwitz] not only gives us an action-packed adventure story, but also provides detailed historical background and vivid character portraits of the principals involvedโฆ Assiduously researched using archival sources, Horwitz's riveting tale is on sound factual footing. And he does a wonderful job of bringing to life the fascinating, messianic leader who, on the way to the gallows, would incite a nation toward civil war.โ โSt. Petersburg Times
โCompelling reading.โ โWichita Eagle
โThe lively narrative focuses on the 1859 attack on an armory in Harpers Ferry, W.Va, by Brown and his ragtag followers -- the event credited with lighting the fuse on the deadliest conflict in U.S. history.โ โSan Jose Mercury News
โA groundbreaking study of the Harper's Ferry raid that makes a number of fascinating points: Brown was not a madman or a fanatic, he knew his death would serve as a moral lightning rod, and the fallout from his actions has echoed for generations.โ โOregonian
โSuperb and amply researchedโฆ [Horwitz] renders with empathy and insight the lives of the individuals Brown touched, whether they were family members, victims, or the idealistic raiders who followed him to Harpers Ferryโฆ Brown's raiders thus appear more human, poignant, and fallible and the whole venture more noble, futile, benighted, heroic, and sadder than heretofore.โ โAmerican Scholar
โGripping, disturbing and heartbreaking... Horwitz brings all his gifts of character building and storytelling to Brown's rise and self-promotionโฆ Horwitz's Brown did not die in vain. By recalling the drama that fired the imagination and fears of Brown's time, Midnight Rising calls readers to account for complacency about social injustices today.โ โLibrary Journal (a Top Ten Book of the Year, 2011)
โLucid and compellingโฆ The author's archival sleuthing pays off with a rich narrative.โ โKirkus Reviews
โ[Horwitz's] vivid biographical portrait of Brown gives us an American original: a failed businessman and harsh Calvinist with a soft spot for the oppressed and a murderous animus against oppressorsโฆ Brown's raiders--a motley crew of his sons and various idealists, adventurers, freedmen, and fugitive slaves--come alive as a romantic, appealing bunch; their agonizing deaths give Horwitz's excellent narrative of the raid and shootout a deep pathos.โ โPublishers Weekly
โThere's a brilliance to this book that put me in mind of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, only Horwitz's Midnight Rising is set deeper in America's dark past. With stunning, vivid detail, he has captured the sheer drama and tragedy of John Brown and that bloody raid at Harpers Ferry that helped propel America toward civil war.โ โErik Larson, author of The Devil in the White City and In the Garden of Beasts
โTony Horwitz's gifts as a vivid narrator of dramatic events are on full display in this story of John Brown's wars in Kansas and his climactic Harpers Ferry raid in 1859. Brown's family and the men who joined him in these fights against slavery receive a more fully rounded treatment than in any other account. Of special note is the discussion of Brown's self-conscious emulation of Samson by pulling down the temple of bondage and dying a martyr in its ruins.โ โJames M. McPherson, author of Battle Cry of Freedom
โMidnight Rising is a deeply compelling work, richly researched and elegantly written. The events surrounding the raid on Harpers Ferry--and the complex character of John Brown himself--come vividly to life in Tony Horwitz's irresistibly readable account.โ โAnnette Gordon-Reed, author of The Hemingses of Monticello
โWith his customary blend of rich archival research, on-location color, and lyrical prose, Tony Horwitz has delivered a John Brown book for our time. Part biography, part historical narrative, Midnight Rising is a riveting re-creation of the Harpers Ferry raid, told with an unblinking sense of Brown's tragic place in American history. Writing with enveloping detail and a storyteller's verve, Horwitz shows why Brown was--and still is--so troubling and important to our culture.โ โDavid W. Blight, author of American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era
โTony Horwitz knows how to tell a story, and here his considerable gifts as a writer bring John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry alive in a style that is just as electric as its subject.โ โJoseph J. Ellis, author of Founding Brothers and First Family
โBeautifully written and sparkling with fresh insights, Midnight Rising resurrects the multiple faces of John Brown: avenging angel or murderous terrorist; slavery's nemesis or deluded fanatic; abolitionist hero or subversive insurrectionist. In this thrilling, magnificent and essential book, Tony Horwitz shows how one man and a single event set the nation on a doomed course where the crimes of a guilty land could only be purged by blood.โ โJames L. Swanson, author of Manhunt and Bloody Crimes