He committed suicide in 1997, at age 64, shortly after finishing his latest book. A year later, he returned to Harvard, as a Nieman Fellow. While at the Times, he won a Pulitzer for a story about an affluent young Connecticut woman caught up in the deadly drug culture of the 1960s.

In fact, absent that kind of obsessive curiosity, I can’t produce a successful book.” A reporter since college (he was on the staff of the Harvard Crimson), Lukas started in newspapers ( Baltimore Sun, New York Times) and then moved into magazines ( The Atlantic, The New Republic, The Nation, Harper’s), and books. I remember asking myself, ‘What in the world is going on when Ted Kennedy is driven to shelter by his ‘own people,’ Boston’s Irish Catholics?’ When a reporter asks himself, ‘What in the world is going on?’ that’s generally a pretty good starting place for a story - or a book. The precise arena came a few months later when I read a news story about an angry crowd that drove Teddy Kennedy off a speaker’s stand in Boston and into the Federal Building which bore his brother’s name, just as school desegregation was beginning there. Bryan seemed to be at the breakfast table with the Iowa farm family that he wrote about, I decided then and there that I wanted to do a book with a family - or several families - at the center of it. The second book I read was Friendly Fire and I was so taken by the way C.D.B. So, not having read about anything much except Richard Nixon for a couple of years - what a depressing thought! - I went down to a bookstore on Fifth Avenue and picked out seven brand new hardcover books that looked compelling. Most writers, I think, want to write the kind of books they like to read. Yet I didn’t know what I wanted to write about. “But after I finished I realized that I’d been looking at it from long distance: I wanted to get closer to my next subject.

2: Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring.) Here’s how Lukas came to the idea: “My last book before Common Ground dealt with (a) theatrical subject - Watergate,” he once told a National Book Foundation interviewer.

28 on the list of the top 100 works of 20th-century U.S. It won both the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction and the National Book Award, and, in 1999, a group of distinguished journalists led by New York University Professor Mitchell Stephens named it No. In braided structure, voice, detail, depth of reporting and elegance of writing, the book is a masterwork of journalistic storytelling. Lukas, a two-time Pulitzer winner, is best known for his bestselling 1985 book Common Ground, about school busing and race relations in Boston.

Common ground anthony lukas