J. Anthony Lukas

Jay Anthony Lukas, or J. Anthony Lucas (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. Common Ground is a classic study of race relations, class conflict, 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 working-class African-American.

Early years

J. Anthony Lukas was born to Elizabeth and Edwin Lukas in White Plains, New York, followed by a younger brother in 1935, Christopher Lukas. His mother was an actress, and his uncle Paul Lukas was an Academy Award–winning actor. Lukas at first wanted to be an actor. After his mother's death by suicide and his father's illness after her death, he was at the age of eight enrolled in the coeducational Putney School boarding school in Vermont. After he graduated he attended Harvard University where he worked at the Harvard Crimson. In 1955 Lukas graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University. He continued his education at the Free University of Berlin as an Adenauer Fellow. Lukas then served in the US Army in Japan where he wrote commentaries for VUNC (the Voice of the United Nations Command).

Career

Lukas began his professional journalism career at the Baltimore Sun, then moved to The New York Times. He stayed at the Times for nine years, working as a roving reporter, and serving at the Washington, New York, and United Nations bureaus, and overseas in Ceylon, India, Japan, Pakistan, South Africa, and Zaire, before the Congo. After working at the New York Times Magazine for a short time in the 1970s, Lukas quit reporting to pursue a career in book and magazine writing, becoming known for writing intensely researched nonfiction works. He was a contributor to the Atlantic Monthly, the Columbia Journalism Review, Esquire, Harper's Magazine, The Nation, The New Republic, and the Saturday Review, a co-founder and editor of MORE, a "critical journal" on the news media, which "collapsed" in 1978, and a "contributing editor to the New Times, an alternative magazine that folded also in 1978."

Death

While his last book, Big Trouble, was undergoing final revisions in 1997, Lukas committed suicide June 5, 1997 by hanging himself with a bathrobe sash in his apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. He had been diagnosed with depression about ten years earlier. In an interview that followed the publication of Common Ground he gave some hints about his impending suicide, linking it with his career as a writer. "All writers ...," he said, "are, to one extent or another, damaged people. Writing is our way of repairing ourselves. In my own case, I was filling a hole in my life which opened at the age of eight, when my mother killed herself, throwing our family into utter disarray. My father quickly developed tuberculosis—psychosomatically triggered, the doctors thought—forcing him to seek treatment in an Arizona sanatorium. We sold our house and my brother and I were shipped off to boarding school. Effectively, from the age of eight, I had no family, and certainly no community. That's one reason the book worked: I wasn't just writing a book about busing. I was filling a hole in myself".

Awards

Lukas won his first Pulitzer Prize in 1968 for an article "The Two Worlds of Linda Fitzpatrick" published by The New York Times (award category Local Investigative Specialized Reporting). It documented the life and violent death of a teenager from a wealthy Greenwich, Connecticut family who became involved in drugs and the hippie movement. Also in 1967 Lukas was awarded a George Polk Award in Local Reporting.

Almost twenty years later he received the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction for Common Ground, as well as the U.S. National Book Award for Nonfiction, the National Book Critics Award, the 1985-1986 Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights Book Award and the Political Book of the Year Award.

The Lukas Prize Project, co-administered by the Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism and the Nieman Foundation at Harvard, supports the work of American nonfiction writers. It hosts conferences and presents three annual awards: the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize, the Mark Lynton History Prize, and the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award.

Selected publications

• "The Two Worlds of Linda Fitzpatrick", 1967, New York Times article on the life and death of a teenager in the hippie and drug counterculture — winner of the Pulitzer Prize
• The Barnyard Epithet and Other Obscenities: Notes on the Chicago Conspiracy Trial, 1970, a story on the Chicago Seven, aka the Chicago Eight
• Don't Shoot, We Are Your Children!, 1971, a collection of stories about members of the 1960s counterculture (including the Linda Fitzgerald article). A section by Kai Erikson —sociologist and professor of American Studies at Yale and editor of The Yale Review— challenged the view that there was a "generation gap" between the sixties generation and their parents generations, arguing that the sixties generation expressed overtly what previous generations had expressed covertly.
• Nightmare: The Underside of the Nixon Years, 1976, a book on Richard Nixon and the Watergate scandal, originating in two long, detailed issue-length articles on Watergate for The New York Times Sunday Magazine, and a third underway but canceled when Nixon resigned. Lukas completed work on the third article and used it as the concluding third of a massive, careful work of journalistic history.
• Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families, 1985, on busing and school desegregation in Boston and three families and their histories.
• Big Trouble, 1997, a posthumously published history of a struggle between unions and mining company officials and supporters in Idaho, early in the twentieth century, after the bombing assassination of former Idaho governor Frank Steunenberg.

External links

• Applegate, Edd, 1996 Literary Journal: A Biographical Dictionary of Writers and Editors, Greenwood Press, Westport, Connecticut
• Freedman,Samuel G, 1997. "A Heart,A Brain, and A Good Pair Of Shoes", 1997 Salon, June 12, 1997
• Mitgang, Herbert, 1985 New York Times, September 15, 1985, Sunday, Late City Final Edition Section 7; Page 1, Column 1; Book Review Desk
• Osen, Diane,"Interview of J. Anthony Lukas"
• Rosenbaum, Rob, 2006, "When Intellectuals Had a Real Magazine: Viva Lingua Franca!", New York News Observer, 4/24/2006
• The State of Narrative Nonfiction Writing", Nieman Reports, The Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University, Vol. 54 No. 3 Fall 2000
• Lukas, Christopher, 2008, "Blue Genes: A Memoir of Loss and Survival", Doubleday. The autobiography of Lukas' brother.
• Blount, Roy Jr., "The Inheritance of Loss", The New York Times Book Review, September 28, 2008.