Tony Horwitz is the author of Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid that Sparked the Civil War. Horwitz was born in Washington DC and graduated from Brown University and the Columbia University School of Journalism. Before becoming an author, Horwitz was a journalist, starting in Indiana. He later became an extraordinary best-selling author, his latest work being Midnight Rising. In the novel, he talks about John Brown's early life and explains the raid he led on Harpers Ferry, Virginia. Horwitz theorizes how John Brown started the Civil War. The author began by introducing John Brown, the main character of Midnight Rising. John Brown was named after his grandfather, “a Connecticut farmer and Revolutionary War officer who married to fight in the Civil War. This gives readers a form of trust in the author, his sources seem reliable, and it improves Horwitz's understanding of the topic he is talking about. One of the sources he uses is a poem by Langston Hughes, a poem that addressed black Americans and John Brown's raid. Hughes describes John Brown as a hero when he states, “We took twenty-one comrades, black and white, and went shooting our way to freedom…” (Horwitz, 2011, p.937). These primary sources are used to identify the type of person John Brown is viewed as. There are authors who speak differently about John Brown and this is demonstrated in the two monographs that follow. The novel "Fire from the Midst of You: A Religious Life of John Brown" by Louis A. DeCaro reveals Brown's roots in Puritan abolitionism and theorizes that Brown's reasoning for the raid was due to his religious preferences. The second novel is Patriotic Treason: John Brown and the Soul of America by Evan Carton. Here, in this monograph the author makes it very clear that John Brown fought for the slaves because he truly cared that everyone had equal rights. Previous historiographies differ in their beliefs as to why John Brown continued to fight for the slaves. However, they share a similarity in explaining Brown's early life and all three authors prefer that of John Brown