Jay Anthony Lukas (April 25, 1933 – June 5, 1997) was an American
journalist and author, best known for his 1985 book Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families.[1]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.[2]
Early life and education
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 committed suicide and his father's illness after her death, he was at the age of eight enrolled in the coeducational
Putney School in Vermont.
Lukas had been diagnosed with
depression in the late 1980s.[5] In an interview that followed the publication of Common Ground in 1985, he had given some hints about his frame of mind, linking it with his career as a writer:
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]
Lukas won his first
Pulitzer Prize in 1968 for "The Two Worlds of Linda Fitzpatrick" in the now-defunct award category of Local Investigative Specialized Reporting.[9] The New York Times article documented the life of a teenager from a wealthy,
Greenwich, Connecticut-based family who became involved in drugs and the
hippie movement before being bludgeoned to death in the basement of an
East Village tenement. Lukas was previously awarded a
George Polk Award in Local Reporting in 1967 for the story.[10]
"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 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 Fitzpatrick 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. Contains a correct guess that
Mark Felt was
Deep Throat.
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.
Previously the Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting, No Edition Time from 1953–1963 and the Pulitzer Prize for Local Investigative Specialized Reporting from 1964–1984