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.

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).

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."

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