Three Authors Win Lukas Prize

Three authors have been named the inaugural winners of the J. Anthony Lukas '55 Prize, an award recognizing superb nonfiction writing in the name of the late Pulitzer Prize-winning author.

Administered by Harvard's Nieman Foundation and the Columbia University School of Journalism, the project recognized Kevin A. Coyne for his work-in-progress, and Adam Hochschild '63 and Henry Mayer for completed books on Monday.

The program commended "the literary grace, the commitment to serious research and the social concern" of the authors, elements that characterized Lukas' works, according to a press release.

Coyne is the winner of the $45,000 J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award, while Hochschild and Mayer receive the Mark Lynton History Prize and the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize, respectively. Both prizes come with a $10,000 award.

The three awards will be presented on May 1 at the first annual Conference on Nonfiction Writing and Awards Ceremony at Columbia.

"I'm delighted to be honored with this award," said Hochschild, who spent three years researching and writing his book King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa, published by Houghton Miffin in the fall of 1998.

Hochschild has worked as a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, Mother Jones magazine and the anti-war monthly Ramparts.

The Bay Area, Calif. resident said he has primarily focused on writing books since 1981.

He is also the author of Half the Way Home: A Memoir of Father and Son and The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin.

Mayer, also a Bay Area resident, has likewise prioritized writing his book in recent years.

"This has been my work for the past decade," said Mayer, describing his work on All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery, a biography published last fall by St. Martin's Press.

Mayer said he found inspiration for his book, which recounts Garrison's critical role in the abolition of slavery, from two different sources.

Mayer said his experience in writing Son of Thunder: Patrick Henry and the American Republic piqued his interest in slavery and constitutional slavery.

He described Garrison, who started the abolitionist newspaper The Liberator in 1831, as a "wonderful example of a journalistic agitator."

When Mayer began his work on the book in 1989, he found only portraits of Garrison as a fanatic. In the course of his research, though, Mayer found Garrison to be a "much nicer" person, he said.

He also found inspiration for his work from his experience as an undergraduate at the University of North Carolina--Chapel Hill (UNC), he said. Mayer, who grew up in a small North Carolina town, said he met a black student at college who had an entirely different life experience than his.

As a result, the 1963 graduate got involved in the civil rights movement at UNC.

"I think at some level I'm writing this book to pull together" the different paths of his experience and of the national experience regarding race Mayer said.

Coyne's forthcoming Viking Penguin work, though also a historical book, is narrower in scope than Mayer's.

He was relieved to have won this "enormous gift" for the work, The Best Years of Their Lives.The book follows the lives of six Freehold, N.J. men through World War II and then their return home to create--and partially lose--a sense of community in the postwar years.

The Freehold resident, who has been working on the book off and on since 1995, said he stopped working on his book fulltime and returned to reporting part-time at the Asbury Park Press when he ran out of money.

With the receipt of the award, he has quit reporting to focus on the completion of his book, which he "can finish a lot more quickly" as a result, he said.

"I always wanted to write this book," said Coyne, who added that his idea got turned down by book publishers a few times before it was finally approved at Viking Penguin in 1995, once his two other books had been published.

Coyne, the author of Domers: A Year at Notre Dame and A Day in the Night of America, which describes night workers throughout the U.S., attributed his final success with a publishing house to the 50th anniversary celebrations of WWII earlier this decade.

He said he hopes to finish his book by the early fall and have it published sometime next year.

The Lukas Prize Project was established in 1998 in memory of Lukas, who died in 1997.

A two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and recipient of the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, Lukas, a former Crimson managing editor, wrote five books.

Among his most noted were Common Ground, which examined the impact of school desegregation in Boston, and the posthumously published Big Trouble, which described turn-of-the-century class conflict in Idaho.

Coyne said he was inspired by Common Ground, praising it as the "most amazing work of reporting and narrative."

The awards program is sponsored by the family of the late Mark Lynton, a Dutch historian and business executive.

Over 150 applicants competed for this year's three prizes.