J. Anthony Lukas

Encyclopedia : J : JA : JAN : J. Anthony Lukas

Jay Anthony Lukas (April 25, 1933–June 5, 1997) was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist and author, probably best known for his 1985 book Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families, a classic study of race relations and school busing in Boston, Massachusetts, as seen through the eyes of three families—one upper middle-class white, one working class white and one African-American.

Lukas graduated from Harvard University in 1955, and began his journalism career at the Baltimore Sun, then moved to the New York Times. He stayed at the New York Times for nine years, working as a roving reporter. He quit the news-reporting job to pursue a career in book and magazine writing, becoming known for writing intensely researched nonfiction works.

It was in 1997, while his last book, Big Trouble, was undergoing final revisions, that he committed suicide by hanging himself with a bathrobe sash. He had been diagnosed with depression about ten years earlier.

Prizes

Lukas won his first Pulitzer for his 1967 New York Times article "The Two Worlds of Linda Fitzpatrick." The article documented the life and violent death of a teenager from a wealthy Greenwich, Connecticut family who became involved in drugs and the hippie movement. He was awarded his second Pulitzer for Common Ground, which also won the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Lukas is now the namesake of the Lukas Prize Project, which is co-administered by the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University. The project was established in 1998 to reward American nonfiction writers. The project gives three awards annually: the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize, the Mark Lynton History Prize, and the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award.

References

From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.