Richard Ben Cramer

Richard Ben Cramer (June 12, 1950 – January 7, 2013) was an American journalist, author, and screenwriter. He was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting in 1979 for his coverage of the Middle East.

Biography Cramer was born and raised in Rochester, New York, the son of Brud and Blossom Cramer. He graduated from Brighton High School in 1967. He wrote for Trapezoid, the school's student newspaper, after he was cut from the baseball team. He earned a bachelor's degree in liberal arts in 1971 from Johns Hopkins University where he was also a writer and editor for The Johns Hopkins News-Letter. Unable to land a job at The Baltimore Sun, he instead attended the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism where he received a master's degree one year later in 1972.

Cramer worked as a journalist at several publications, including The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Baltimore Sun, Esquire Magazine, and Rolling Stone. He won a Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting in 1979 for his coverage of the Middle East as a foreign correspondent for The Philadelphia Inquirer and was a finalist for the same Prize in 1981. His work as a political reporter culminated in What It Takes: The Way to the White House, an account of the 1988 presidential election that is considered one of the seminal journalistic studies of presidential electoral politics. His next book, Joe DiMaggio: The Hero's Life, was a New York Times bestseller in 2000. He was an avid New York Yankees fan and lived on the Eastern Shore of Maryland.

Books Ted Williams: The Seasons of the Kid (1991) What It Takes: The Way to the White House (1992) Bob Dole (1994) Joe DiMaggio: The Hero's Life (2000) What Do You Think of Ted Williams Now? A Remembrance (2002) How Israel Lost: The Four Questions (2004)