September 5, 2001

Birmingham native Howell Raines became the executive editor of The New York Times. Raines began his career as a reporter with the Birmingham Post-Herald and worked for several newspapers across the Southeast. He started working for The New York Times in 1978 and, in 1992, won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing for his story “Grady’s Gift” about his family’s black housekeeper and his childhood in Alabama. During Raines’s first year as executive editor of The Times, the newspaper won a record seven Pulitzer Prizes. Raines is the author of several books, including “Whiskey Man” and the best-selling memoir “Fly Fishing Through the Midlife Crisis.”

Read more at Encyclopedia of Alabama.

Howell Raines (1943- ) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author whose newspaper career began as a reporter in Birmingham. He rose to become a lauded editor of The New York Times before his involvement in the Jayson Blair plagiarism scandal ended his tenure at The Times in 2003. (From Encyclopedia of Alabama, courtesy of The Birmingham News)

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