Jay Anthony Lukas was a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author, probably best known for his 1985 book Common Ground : A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families a study of race relations and school busing in Boston, Massachusetts in the mid - 1970's.

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. 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,

In 1997, while his final book, Big Trouble, was undergoing final revisions, Lukas committed suicide by hanging himself with a bathrobe sash.He had been diagnosed with depression approximately ten years earlier,

Bibliography information from Wikipedia.