J. A. Lukas; Wrote on Turmoil in U.S. Society

NEW YORK — J. Anthony Lukas, who won two Pulitzer Prizes for writing about America’s painful social upheavals, has committed suicide, apparently in part because he was dissatisfied with a recently completed book. He was 64.

Lukas was found dead Thursday in his Manhattan apartment. An autopsy Friday showed that he had asphyxiated himself, said Ellen Borakove of the medical examiner’s officed.

Lukas had recently finished a book about a politically charged murder trial in the West at the turn of the century.

“He’d been in a funk since he finished the book,” his agent, Amanda Urban, told Lukas’ former employer, the New York Times, in an obituary published Friday. “He’d convinced himself that it was not good enough, which was crazy because it was brilliant.”

Lukas’ first Pulitzer, in 1968, was for a Times article on “The Two Worlds of Linda Fitzpatrick,” who grew up as a child of privilege in Connecticut but as a teenager was beaten to death with her hippie boyfriend in the squalid, drug-ridden East Village.

In 1986, 16 years after leaving daily journalism, he won his second Pulitzer for the book “Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families.” It described the effects of court-ordered busing on families during Boston’s school integration crisis in the 1960s and ‘70s. The book was made into a miniseries broadcast on CBS in 1990.

The account, which also won an American Book Award, was judged “extraordinary” in a Los Angeles Times review. The review assessed Lukas’ writing as “a careful, dispassionate reconstruction of events by a writer who knows how to weave history, fact, anecdote, dialogue and description into an utterly compelling narrative.”

In Lukas’ view, the struggle over school desegregation was not simply a matter of race relations: It was also a class conflict.

“During my research, I found a curious phenomenon,” Lukas said in an Opinion section article he wrote for the Los Angeles Times. “The resentment which the Irish of Charlestown and South Boston felt most intensely was not so much against blacks . . . and not against the fabled Yankees . . . but against the Irish who had made it, their own kind who had ‘betrayed’ them.”

Lukas’ other books included: “The Barnyard Epithet and Other Obscenities: Notes on the Chicago Conspiracy Trial,” “Don’t Shoot--We Are Your Children” and “Nightmare: The Underside of the Nixon Years.”

Born April 25, 1933, in New York, Lukas was a 1955 graduate of Harvard University.

After Army service and brief work as a speech writer, he worked for the Baltimore Sun for four years, then joined the New York Times.

Lukas is survived by his wife, an editor at Pantheon Books, and a brother.