A journalist for more than three decades, Zaslow wrote three books before breaking into the best-seller ranks with The Last Lecture. He wrote the book with Randy Pausch, a terminally ill professor whose farewell speech at Carnegie Mellon became an Internet sensation after Zaslow posted a video clip online with a Wall Street Journal article he had written about the talk.
The Last Lecture - published three months before Pausch's death from cancer in 2008 - has sold more than 5 million copies in English and has been translated into 48 languages.
Zaslow followed with two more best-sellers: Highest Duty, cowritten with Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger, the pilot hailed as a hero after calmly landing his disabled passenger jet in New York's Hudson River and saving 155 lives; and The Girls from Ames, a chronicle of the friendship shared by 11 women from rural Iowa. Both were published in 2009.
"I'm interested in people's deepest, sharpest emotions," the author said in 2010 in a story in the Patriot Ledger of Quincy, Mass. "That's what I like writing about. Life's transitions are very emotional."
Zaslow, who was born in Philadelphia on Oct. 6, 1958, was a 1980 graduate of Carnegie Mellon, where he studied creative writing. He began his career as a feature writer for the Orlando Sentinel, leaving in 1983 to join the Wall Street Journal as a columnist.
One of his most memorable Journal pieces concerned a Chicago Sun-Times contest to select a successor to advice columnist Ann Landers. Zaslow decided that the best way to research the story was to enter the competition. Out of 12,000 applicants, he was chosen to share the column with Diane Crowley, daughter of the original Ann Landers.
He wrote the advice column for 14 years, until he returned to the Journal in 2001. He also wrote Gabby (2011), a book about Gabrielle Giffords, the former Arizona congresswoman who survived an assassin's bullet to the head.
