Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families

J. Anthony Lukas (1933-1997) was an American journalist and author renowned for his deeply researched nonfiction exploring social fault lines in 20th-century America, including race relations, class conflict, and political scandals in notable works like Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families (1985), Nightmare: The Underside of the Nixon Years (1976), and Big Trouble (1997, posthumous). He won two Pulitzer Prizes—one in 1968 for his New York Times article "The Two Worlds of Linda Fitzpatrick" and another in 1986 for Common Ground—along with the National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award for the latter.