After graduating from Middlebury College in 1937, Heinz started his newspaper career as a copy boy for the New York Sun, where he was quickly elevated to the city desk working feature stories. In 1944, he was sent to Europe as a war correspondent for the Sun. Over the next 14 months he honed his journalistic skills, writing more than 200 cable dispatches including those from D-Day along the Normandy coast aboard the U.S.S. Nevada, the liberation of Paris, and the Battle of the Huertgen Forest. It was here that he shared a farmhouse and his typewriter with another more experienced correspondent, Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway liked the typewriter that was a gift to Heinz from his father in 1932. Used extensively by Heinz to type hundreds of columns, magazine articles and his books throughout his long career, this typewriter is now on display with a sampling of Heinz’s other war and sports memorabilia.

Heinz’s war reportage was highly regarded stateside, and upon his return he was awarded his own sports column at the Sun. He began writing his popular daily column, “The Sport Scene”, which covered boxing, baseball, football, and horse racing. His writing, noted for its concise, understated eloquence, is finely illustrated in his famous article of 1949, “Death of a Racehorse”. During the 1950s, Heinz developed a career as a freelance writer. His articles appeared in Life, Look, The Saturday Evening Post, Esquire, Colliers and True, among others. He won the E.P. Dutton Award five times for best magazine story of the year.

The Professional, published in 1958, was Heinz’s first book. It was a story of a boxer and his trainer and garnered high praise from Ernest Hemingway who called it “the only good novel I’ve ever read about a fighter, and an excellent first novel in its own right.” Heinz went on to write additional highly acclaimed books including, among others, the football classic, Run to Daylight! with Vince Lombardi, the novel, The Surgeon, and M*A*S*H, the wartime medical novel. M*A*S*H, which Heinz wrote under the pen name, Richard Hooker, along with Dr. H. Richard Hornberger of Maine, spawned the award winning film and television series. Among his later books are collections of his best articles and columns: American Mirror, What A time It Was: The Best of W. C. Heinz on Sports, and When We Were One: Stories of World War II.

Heinz was inducted into the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Hall of Fame in 2001, and the International Boxing Hall of Fame in 2004. He was posthumously awarded the 2008 Red Smith Award for his contribution to sports journalism. Heinz’s work has been reprinted in more than sixty anthologies, including The Best American Sports Writing of the Century.