(212) 854-2419 April 5, 1999

kkb18@columbia.edu

Two books and a work-in-progress have been named winners of the

J. Anthony Lukas Prize Project, a new awards program that recognizes superb examples of nonfiction writing that exemplify the literary grace, the commitment to serious research, and the social concern that characterized the distinguished work of the award’s namesake.

The winners are:

The J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize ($10,000): Henry Mayer, All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery (St. Martin’s Press). A National Book Award Finalist, All on Fire recounts Garrison’s seminal role in the abolition of slavery -- on a par with Abraham Lincoln. Mayer illustrates how the religious, political, literary, and social forces of 1820-1865 coalesced to bring about a rupture in the American social order. He is the author of Son of Thunder: Patrick Henry and the American Republic.

The prize’s jurors were David Burnham, Melissa Fay Greene and Jonathan Yardley.

The Mark Lynton History Prize ($10,000): Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa (Houghton Mifflin). A haunting account of the plundering of the Congo by King Leopold II of Belgium, King Leopold’s Ghost tells of the heroic efforts to expose the crimes that eventually led to the first great human rights movement of the twentieth century, in which everyone from Mark Twain to the Archbishop of Canterbury participated. Hochschild is also the author of Half the Way Home: A Memoir of Father and Son and The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin, both of which were named Notable Books of the Year by The New York Times Book Review and Library Journal.

The prize’s jurors were David Levering Lewis, Patricia Nelson Limerick and Richard Snow. Two finalists were also noted: Patricia Cline Cohen’s The Murder of Helen Jewett (Alfred A. Knopf), an account of the killing, in 1836, of a Manhattan prostitute and the trial that followed, and Jill Lepore’s The Name of War, which provides a deep and resonant understanding of the complexities of the encounter between whites and Indians in colonial America.

The J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award ($45,000): Kevin Coyne, The Best Years of Their Lives, to be published by Viking Penguin. The forthcoming book traces the lives of six men from the same New Jersey town as they fight in World War II and return home to create, and in some ways, lose, a sense of community in the succeeding decades. Coyne is the author of A Day in the Night of America and Domers: A Year at Notre Dame.

The prize’s jurors were Samuel Freedman, Cynthia Gorney and Tracy Kidder. Two finalists were also noted: William Adler’s forthcoming Universal Manufacturing, to be published by Scribner, which humanizes the impersonal and often bewildering globalization of the economy by following one factory job as it passes from the urban North to the rural South to Mexico over the course of a half-century, and Anne Matthews Wild Nights: Nature Returns to New York, to be published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

The awards are co-administered by the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University, and are sponsored by the family of the late Mark Lynton, a historian and senior executive at the firm Hunter Douglas in the Netherlands.

The three awards will be presented on May 1, 1999, at the first annual Conference on Nonfiction Writing and Awards Ceremony at Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism. Next year’s conference and ceremony will be held at Harvard. The conference will open with the awards presentation and include a panel discussion, “The Perils of Narrative,” with prize winners Henry Mayer, Adam Hochschild and Kevin Coyne, moderated by Nicholas Lemann and Brent Staples. Following the luncheon and keynote address by Russell Baker, a concluding panel discussion will explore “Fact? Fiction? Faction? The Use of Fictional Techniques in Nonfiction Writing.” The discussion, moderated by Bill Kovach and Kati Marton, will feature David Fanning, executive producer, Frontline; Nicholas Gage, author, Eleni; Jonathan Harr, author, A Civil Action; Alice Mayhew, editorial director, Simon & Schuster; Simon Schama, historian, Columbia University, and Neil Shapiro, executive producer, Dateline NBC.

Established last year, the Lukas Prize Project honors and perpetuates the work that distinguished the career of acclaimed journalist and author J. Anthony Lukas, who died in 1997. The winner of two Pulitzer Prizes, the National Book

Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award, Lukas published five epic books, each of which examined a critical fault line in America’s social and political landscape by examining individual lives caught up in the havoc of change. A former foreign and national correspondent for The New York Times, Lukas tackled the country’s generational conflict in his first book Don’t Shoot: We Are Your Children; examined the impact of school desegregation in Common Ground, and told a sweeping tale of class conflict at the turn of the century in Big Trouble, completed just before his death.

Arthur Gelb, author and president of The New York Times Foundation, and Linda Healey, editor and Mr. Lukas’ widow, are co-chairs of the J. Anthony Lukas Prize Committee. Its members are Alan Brinkley, author and historian; Ellen Chesler, author and senior fellow, Open Society Institute; Tom Goldstein, dean of Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism; Vartan Gregorian, president, The Carnegie Corporation; Bill Kovach, curator of the Nieman Foundation; Nicholas Lemann, author and staff writer, The New Yorker; Marion Lynton, Mr. Lynton’s widow; author and human rights activist Kati Marton; and author and New York Times editorial board member Brent Staples.

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