Rick Atkinson

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Rick Atkinson (born 1952, in Munich) is an American journalist and author whose contributions led to four Pulitzer Prizes.

Atkinson was born in Munich. His father was an United States Army officer and he grew up at military posts.

He earned his bachelor degree from East Carolina University in 1974 and a master of art degree from the University of Chicago in 1976. His first reporting job was at the The Morning Sun in Pittsburg, Kansas

He started working at the Kansas City Times in 1977. He won the 1982 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting for articles including a series on the West Point Class of 1966. He also contributed^[1] to the Times overall effort which won it another Pulitzer Prize the same year for the coverage of the Hyatt Regency walkway collapse.

In 1983 he worked for The Washington Post where he covered The Pentagon and the 1984 Presidential election and was national editor for two years. He went on book leave in 1988 to finish The Long Gray Line, which he had begun reporting on in Kansas City.

He returned to the Post in 1989 and was the paper's lead reporter in the 1991 Gulf War. He went on leave again to finish a book about the war Crusade: The Untold Story of the Persian Gulf War.

In 1993 he returned to the Post as its Berlin bureau covering conflicts in Bosnia and Somalia. The Post won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for public service for a series conceived by Atkinson on shootings by the District of Columbia police department.

He personally won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for history for his book An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa, 1942-1943.

Atkinson served as the Omar N. Bradley Chair of Strategic Leadership [1] at the US Army War College and Dickinson College in 2004 and 2005.

Atkinson's book In the Company of Soldiers: A Chronicle of Combat is about the Iraq War where he was embedded with the 101st Airborne Division for two months and had extensive contact with David Petraeus.

[edit] Bibliography

(1989) The Long Gray Line. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. ISBN 0-395-48008-6.
(1993) Crusade: The Untold Story of the Persian Gulf War. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. ISBN 0-395-60290-4.
(2002) An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa, 1942-1943. New York: Henry Holt. ISBN 0-8050-6288-2.
(2004) In the Company of Soldiers: A Chronicle of Combat. New York: Henry Holt. ISBN 0-8050-7561-5.
(2007) The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944. New York: Henry Holt. ISBN 0-8050-6289-0.