Jeffrey Zaslow, a longtime Wall Street Journal writer and best-selling author with a rare gift for writing about love, loss, and other life passages with humor and empathy, died at age 53 on Friday of injuries suffered in a car crash in northern Michigan. He died after losing control of his car while driving on a snowy road and colliding with a truck, according to his wife and the Antrim County Sheriff's Office. The condition of the truck driver wasn't available.
In addition to writing hundreds of memorable Journal articles and columns, Mr. Zaslow did a long stint as an advice columnist at the Chicago Sun-Times, succeeding Ann Landers—a job he won after he entered a competition for the position as an angle for a Journal front-page feature.
At the Journal his subjects ranged from the anguish of losing a car in the Disney World parking lot, to the power of fathers' lunchbox letters to their daughters, to the distinctive pain of watching a beloved childhood stadium go under the wrecking ball.
More recently, he became one of America's best-selling nonfiction writers, known internationally for such books as "The Girls from Ames," the story of a 40-year friendship among 10 women, and "The Last Lecture," about Randy Pausch, a Carnegie Mellon University computer-science professor who in 2007 was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and given only a few months to live.
After Mr. Pausch gave an inspirational multimedia presentation about his life's lessons, Mr. Zaslow—a 1980 Carnegie Mellon graduate—wrote a Journal column about the lecture and posted it on the Journal's website with a video that became an online sensation. The resulting book spent more than a year on best-seller lists and was translated into dozens of languages.
I distinctly remember reading that column in the newspaper, back in the days when I read the physical paper (and when I had a subscription to it, before the tragedy - well, not tragedy; his death is a tragedy - the misfortune of Murdoch buying the paper).
The newspaper article that probably had the greatest impact on Mr. Zaslow’s own life was one he wrote in 1987 about a contest The Chicago Sun-Times was holding to fill the job left vacant when its advice columnist, Eppie Lederer (Ann Landers), de-camped for a competitor, The Chicago Tribune.
Mr. Zaslow, who was then a feature writer for The Wall Street Journal, entered the contest for the fun of it. And he won. In an interview with The New York Times, he said some people thought he was underqualified. “How could you have the audacity to give advice?,” people scolded him, he said. “My reply: ‘I’m 28, but I have the wisdom of a 29-year-old.’ ” He wrote the advice column, “All That Zazz,” until 2001. His annual singles party for charity, Zazz Bash, drew 7,000 readers a year and resulted in 78 marriages.
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