Award-winning journalist Richard Ben Cramer dies

WASHINGTON Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Richard Ben Cramer, whose in-depth non-fiction spanned presidential politics, baseball, and an Oscar-nominated documentary, has died. He was 62.

His agent, Philippa Brophy, says Cramer died Monday at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore from complications of lung cancer.

Cramer won the 1979 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting for his reports from the Middle East while with The Philadelphia Inquirer.

He also wrote for Time, Newsweek, The New York Times Magazine, the Baltimore Sun, Esquire, and Rolling Stone.

He authored "Joe DiMaggio: A Hero's Life" (Simon & Schuster), a best-selling biography of the New York Yankees great; a profile of another baseball star, Ted Williams, in Esquire Magazine, which was recently updated and republished as a trade paperback; and his book, "What It Takes: The Way to the White House" (Vintage), which provided a detailed, behind-the-scenes account of the 1988 U.S. presidential election.

Other books include "How Israel Lost: The Four Questions" (Simon & Schuster), and a 1992 biography of Senator Bob Dole.

He wrote several documentaries, including "The Choice" (1992), and "Tabloid Truth: The Michael Jackson Story" (1994) for PBS' "Frontline." He also co-wrote and narrated "The Battle Over 'Citizen Kane,'" a 1996 Academy Award nominee for Best Documentary Feature that chronicled the public and private wars between director Orson Welles and newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst, the unwilling subject of his greatest film.

Cramer's other TV credits include "The Irish in America: Long Journey Home," and "The Supreme Court."

Cramer lived with his wife, Joan, on Maryland's Eastern Shore.