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Jeffrey Zaslow

Biography

Jeffrey Zaslow

Jeffrey Zaslow was an American author and journalist and a columnist for The Wall Street Journal.

Zaslow was born in 1958 in Broomall, Pennsylvania, and attended Marple Newtown High School, where he was student council president his senior year. He wrote for the school paper and was in school plays while in junior high. After graduating from Carnegie Mellon University in 1980 with a degree in creative writing, Zaslow began his professional writing career at the Orlando Sentinel.

Zaslow was widely known as coauthor of best-selling books including THE LAST LECTURE (2008) with Randy Pausch; HIGHEST DUTY: My Search for What Really Matters with Captain Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger (2009); as well as GABBY: A Story of Courage and Hope (2011) with Gabrielle Giffords and her husband, astronaut Mark Kelly. He was the sole author of numerous books, including TELL ME ALL ABOUT IT (1990), THE GIRLS FROM AMES (2009), and THE MAGIC ROOM (2012).

He was twice named by the National Society of Newspaper Columnists as best columnist in a newspaper with more than 100,000 circulation and had received the Distinguished Column Writing Award from the New York Newspaper Publishers Association. While working at the Sun-Times, Zaslow received the Will Rogers Humanitarian Award. He appeared on such television programs as "The Tonight Show," "The Oprah Winfrey Show," "Larry King Live," "60 Minutes," "The Today Show" and "Good Morning America."

Zaslow died on February 10, 2012, at age 53 in a car accident while on tour for his non-fiction book THE MAGIC ROOM. Former co-author Chesley Sullenberger was among those who eulogized Zaslow at his funeral on February 13.

Following his death, Zaslow was the subject of a number of written tributes, including an essay by columnist Bob Greene, pieces by fellow journalists and by bloggers, posts on the Wall Street Journal remembrance page, and eulogies by family members on the family's remembrance page.

Jeffrey Zaslow

Books by Jeffrey Zaslow

Randy Pausch, with Jeffrey Zaslow - Nonfiction

A number of professors give talks titled "The Last Lecture," where they are asked to consider their demise and to ruminate on what matters most to them. When Randy Pausch, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon, was asked to give such a lecture, he didn't have to imagine it as his last, since he had recently been diagnosed with terminal cancer.