Harrison Smith, AB’14, joined The Washington Post as an obituary writer in 2015. He has written the life stories of Olympic athletes, the first US secretary of transportation, Ozzy Osbourne, and the inventor of the Hawaiian pizza. In May he became the Post’s obituaries editor. His comments have been edited and condensed.

How did you become an obituary writer?

I knew I wanted to be in journalism in some way. In college I was fascinated by what was called, at the time, narrative nonfiction. I had teachers at UChicago who turned me onto Joan Didion and John McPhee and these great nonfiction writers who found compelling ways to tell stories that were entirely factual but had the style and verve of a great novel.

I had a few internships, one thing led to another, and a job opened up at the Post. It was billed as profile writing. You were writing about fascinating people. You had a chance to be on the front page. You got to tell great stories. The one catch was that all of your subjects happened to be dead.

I never thought of obit writing as a destination, but it’s a wonderful showcase for narrative writing. And it’s a great chance to tell interesting stories about fascinating people.

Which obituary writers do you particularly admire?

I really love Emily Langer’s work. She started at the Post obits desk a little bit before I did. She had a wonderful way of humanizing her subjects.

Margalit Fox at The New York Times had a singular way of writing about people who were colorful but overlooked or not widely known. One that really stands out to me is a story she did on John Fairfax, an explorer and adventurer who’s the first person in recorded history to row solo across an ocean. The story was so perfect because it wasn’t an exhaustive play-by-play of his life. You got just the right amount of details.

There was a guy at The New York Times, Robert McG. Thomas Jr.—a terrific byline. He had a similar way, where you just knew when you were reading a “McG” story. The best pieces were not about presidents or household names. They were stories about more marginal figures who’d had fascinating lives.

How do you decide who gets an obit?

There’s no formula. We want to be able to write about politicians and national figures who had an impact across the country, if not the world. Aside from those obvious cases, we try to think about who would make a great story, who should readers know about, and who would readers want to read about.

Frequently these are inspirational stories, but sometimes we do write about folks who are more notorious. One of the most upsetting and emotional days I had on the job was writing about Jon Burge, one of the ringleaders of police torture in Chicago. I remember saying to my boss that this story would be very important, not just in Chicago, but for the historical record. Because an obit is a way not just of writing about a single person but of capturing a moment in time.

The guy who invented the plastic lawn flamingo—which I did not write, unfortunately—is also the kind of person we want to spotlight. The guy who invented Heelys, the shoes, made a great obit. It’s folks who shaped American society and culture, for better or worse.

It must be emotional to talk to so many people who are grieving.

We lost a colleague at the Post recently, an editor named Dan Eggen. I know that having an obituary for him offered people a way to channel their energy and to feel like he was noticed and seen and appreciated.

With writers and artists, especially, an obit can offer a bit of second life. I’ve discovered plenty of folks that I would not have read or listened to and known about otherwise, were it not for the obit.

I know it means a lot for families and friends to be able to talk to an obit writer and share stories. It’s hard. You’re often catching people on one of the worst days of their life. But I find that folks open up after a few minutes on the phone. They’re very interested in talking about this person. They want to make sure the story is told.

How does being an editor change your work?

One of the things we’re trying to tackle at the Post, and that I know just about every news organization is these days, is how to continue to reach readers where they are. I don’t think there’s going to be any decline in the number of people interested in hearing about a fascinating or colorful life—interested in reading an obit, essentially. The big challenge now is in figuring out how best to meet those people. So we’re looking to experiment with video and audio and with mixing up the obit subjects that we cover.

We don’t have as big a staff as we used to. The challenge is in trying to tell the stories of the world’s most interesting and impactful people while only having one full-time obituary staffer to do it. We do a lot of pieces in advance. You never want an obit to have to run, obviously, but it’s good to be prepared, and we want these stories to be as elegant and insightful as possible.

Are there qualities obit writers tend to have in common?

The reputation used to be that it was people who were at the very beginning of their careers and people who were at the very end of their careers, or that people who had sort of fizzled out in other areas of the newsroom were sent to the obit desk as a kind of punishment.

But in the past 20 or 30 years, I think it’s become a much more interesting assignment. You get to write about anybody and everybody, and you have room to give it a bit of narrative oomph. A lot of obit writers are people who want to tell stories. In general they’re a very curious bunch.

One of my former colleagues, Matt Schudel, has an incredible, seemingly photographic memory for names and dates. He can rattle off birthdays and tell you every famous person who was born on any given date. I don’t know if that’s an obit writer trait in particular, but it helps to have that interest in history and certainly a bit of institutional memory.

Does writing obits make you think about your own life differently?

You build up a certain distance to death and to the fact that you’re writing about someone who’s gone. The story is about the life and not the death, and that’s what I’m focused on when I’m writing and reporting. But there are a couple of things that happen. One is that I’m always thinking about people who would make good obituaries and wondering if we have an advance ready for them.

It’s also encouraging to have written so many obituaries where the subject discovered something new about themselves or took their life in an entirely new direction relatively late. Pearl Fryar, this South Carolina topiary artist I wrote about a week or two ago, started making topiaries in his early 40s, and that became his life’s passion. There was a sculptor I did last month, Thaddeus Mosley, who worked at a post office in Pittsburgh by night and sculpted by day, and he really didn’t get widespread recognition until he was 92. There’s something very hopeful about reading about people who have taken many left turns in life. It’s a helpful reminder that things aren’t linear and that life moves at its own pace.

You were named the Obituary Writer of the Year by the Society of Professional Obituary Writers in 2019.

They refer to the award as a Grimmy, and it’s a lovely tombstone-shaped prize.

I played a very small role in the Post’s coverage of the January 6 insurrection a few years ago, and the paper won a Pulitzer for that. Even though I played a very small part, I got a Pulitzer Prize for being part of this team of journalists. The Pulitzer is lovely, but the Grimmy is the coolest thing ever.