J. Anthony Lukas

Jay Anthony Lukas (April 25, 1933 – June 5, 1997) was an American

He attended Harvard University, where he worked at the Harvard Crimson and graduated magna cum laude in 1955. He continued his education at the Free University of Berlin as an Adenauer Fellow. Thereafter, he served in the United States Army in Japan, where he wrote commentaries for VUNC (the Voice of the United Nations Command).^[3]

Career

Lukas began his professional journalism career at

All writers 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.^[6]

In 1997, Lukas' book,

Almost twenty years later, he received the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction for Common Ground,^[11] as well as the U.S.

• "The Two Worlds of Linda Fitzpatrick", 1967, The New York Times article on the life and death of a teenager in the
  1960s counterculture — winner of the Pulitzer Prize^[9]
• "The Barnyard Epithet and Other Obscenities: Notes on the Chicago Conspiracy Trial", 1970, a story on the
  Chicago Eight
• Don't Shoot, We Are Your Children!, 1971, a collection of stories about members of the
  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.
• "After the Pentagon Papers–A Month in the New Life of Daniel Ellsberg", 1971, The New York Times story on Ellsberg's meetings with various anti-Vietnam War activists, motivations behind leaking the Papers, and friendships with Harry Rowen and Tony Russo.^[16]
• Nightmare: The Underside of the Nixon Years, 1976, a book on
  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. Contains a correct guess that Mark Felt was Deep Throat
  .
• Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families, 1985, a book 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
  .