× Expand Howard Zinn Revocable Trust Howard Zinn at his typewriter in the late 1970s. The back of photo reads, “writing on my old typewriter on which I wrote A People's History of the United States.” So reading Dave Zirin’s The People’s Historian: The Outsized Life of Howard Zinn—a warm, perceptive, and timely biography—and finding in it some quotes from those columns Zinn wrote for us was a thrill. Zinn, who died in 2010, is most famous for writing A People’s History of the United States: 1492 to Present. But it picks right up again when Zirin gets to A People’s History.