David Halberstam, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author, died on Monday in a car crash south of San Francisco, The New York Times reported. Mr. Halberstam, who was 73 and lived in Manhattan, was in the Bay area to interview Y.A. Tittle, a former New York Giants quarterback, for a book about the 1958 championship game between the Giants and the Baltimore Colts. Sports provide the grist for several of Mr. Halberstam’s books, which include more than 20 titles on a wide variety of topics. But he first made his mark as a journalist covering the Vietnam War. He chronicled what went wrong in Vietnam in his 1972 book, The Best and the Brightest. He also wrote a book on the Korean War that is scheduled to be published in the fall. Mr. Halberstam spoke Saturday night at the University of California at Berkeley on “Turning Journalism into History,” the San Jose Mercury News reported. The driver of the vehicle in which Mr. Halberstam was riding was a Berkeley graduate student, one of a group of students selected to chauffeur visiting writers.