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Anthony Lewis
tlewis@galaxy.net

Anthony Lewis was a columnist for The New York Times from 1969 to December 2001. He has twice won the Pulitzer Prize.

Mr. Lewis was born in New York City in 1927; he attended the Horace Mann School in New York and Harvard College, receiving a BA in 1948.

From 1948 to 1952 he was a deskman in the Sunday Department of The Times. In 1952 he became a reporter for the Washington Daily News. In 1955 he won a Pulitzer for national reporting for a series of articles in The News on the dismissal of a Navy employee as a security risk – dismissal without telling the employee the sources or nature of the charges against him. The articles led to the employee's reinstatement.

In 1955 Mr. Lewis joined the Washington bureau of The Times. In 1956-57 he was a Nieman Fellow; he spent the academic year studying at the Harvard Law School. On his return to Washington, he covered the Supreme Court, the Justice Department and other legal matters, including the government's handling of the civil rights movement. He won his second Pulitzer for his coverage of the Supreme Court in 1963.

He became the chief of The Times London bureau in 1964. He began writing his column from London in 1969. Since 1973 he has been located in Boston. He travels frequently, in the United States and abroad.

Mr. Lewis is the author of three books: Gideon's Trumpet, about a landmark Supreme Court Case; Portrait of a Decade, about the great changes in American race relations, and Make No Law: The Sullivan Case and the First Amendment.

Mr. Lewis was for 15 years a lecturer on law at the Harvard Law School, teaching a course on the Constitution and the Press. He has taught at a number of other universities as a visitor, among them the Universities of California, Illinois, Oregon and Arizona. Since 1983 he has held the James Madison Visiting Professorship at Columbia University

 

 

Contributions

Would you use the adjective 'heroic' to describe the American news media?
COMMENTARY | February 28, 2005
Anthony Lewis on broadcasters who sound like a cheering section, a government that would charge $372,799 for an FOIA request, and a press that, overall, isn’t exactly heroic.


Anthony Lewis on the Framers, the 1st Amendment and watchdog reporting
COMMENTARY | April 08, 2004
James Madison, a big defender of watchdog reporting


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