His books include One for the Road: a Hitchhiker's Outback (1987), Baghdad Without a Map (1991), Confederates in the Attic (1998), Blue Latitudes (AKA Into the Blue) (2002), A Voyage Long and Strange: Rediscovering the New World (2008),[2] Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War (2011),[3] and Spying on the South: An Odyssey Across the American Divide (2019).

Horwitz won a 1994 James Aronson Award and the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for his stories about working conditions in low-wage America published in The Wall Street Journal.

He also worked as a staff writer for The New Yorker and as a foreign correspondent covering conflicts in Africa, Europe, and the Middle East.

[8] He was a fellow at the Radcliffe College Center of Advanced Study and a past president of the Society of American Historians.

In 2020 it established the Tony Horwitz Prize honoring distinguished work in American history of wide appeal and enduring public significance.