Tom Junod
Writer at Large
Esquire

Citation
On September 12, 2001, The New York Times published a photograph of an unidentified man jumping from the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Two years later, Tom Junod wrote about his search to learn the identity of the man in a gripping account that forced readers to re-examine their feelings about what transpired that day. Junod’s story displayed intellectual fearlessness for exploring terrain avoided by other journalists, particularly after newspapers that ran the photo of the Falling Man were forced to defend themselves against charges that they were exploiting a man’s death. Touched in different ways by Junod’s piece, Esquire readers responded with hundreds of letters and thousands of calls—some thankful, some angry. “A common theme in the letters,” said Esquire Executive Editor Mark Warren, “is that the readers were not aware that they had anything more to feel about September 11, 2001, and that The Falling Man showed them otherwise.”

Excerpt
The Falling Man
September 2003
From the beginning, the spectacle of doomed people jumping from the upper floors of the World Trade Center resisted redemption. They were called “jumpers” or “the jumpers,” as though they represented a new lemminglike class. The trial that hundreds endured in the building and then in the air became its own kind of trial for the thousands watching them from the ground. No one ever got used to it; no one who saw it wished to see it again, although, of course, many saw it again. Each jumper, no matter how many there were, brought fresh horror, elicited shock, tested the spirit, struck a lasting blow. Those tumbling through the air remained, by all accounts, eerily silent, those on the ground screamed. It was the sight of the jumpers that prompted Rudy Giuliani to say to his police commissioner, “We’re in uncharted waters now.” It was the sight of the jumpers that prompted a woman to wail, “God! Save their souls! They’re jumping! Oh, please God! Save their souls!” And it was, at last, the sight of the jumpers that provided the corrective to those who insisted on saying that what they were witnessing was “like a movie,” for this was an ending as unimaginable as it was unbearable: Americans responding to the worst terrorist attack in the history of the world with acts of heroism, with acts of sacrifice, with acts of generosity, with acts of martyrdom, and, by terrible necessity, with one prolonged act of—if these words can be applied to mass murder—mass suicide.

Biography
Tom Junod started his journalism career at Atlanta Magazine, before moving on to Life, Sports Illustrated, GQ, and Esquire. At GQ, Junod won two National Magazine Awards, the first for a profile of an abortion doctor, the second for a profile of a rapist undergoing therapy while enduring what is known as "civil commitment." At Esquire, Junod has written profiles of Kevin Spacey, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Fred Rogers, and FBI counter-terrorist expert John O’Neill, among others, and reported on American hostages in Equador. His 2003 piece, “The Falling Man,” is a finalist for a National Magazine Award this year. Junod, 46, whose first job out of college was selling handbags, splits his time between Atlanta, Ga. and Shelter Island, N.Y. with his wife, Janet, and their daughter Antonia Li.