Anthony Lewis was an award-winning journalist and author. He was born on March 27, 1927 in New York City. He died at 85, two days before his birthday, on March 25, 2013 in Cambridge, Mass.
His wife, Margaret H. Marshall, a retired chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, said there were complications of renal and heart failure, according to The New York Times.
“The American commitment to freedom of speech and press is the more remarkable because it emerged from legal and political origins that were highly repressive,” Lewis wrote in “Freedom for the Thought That We Hate: A Biography of the First Amendment,” which he authored and published in 2007.
For 15 years, Lewis lectured on law at Harvard Law School. He taught a course on The Constitution and the Press. And he taught at numerous more universities as a visitor.
He won two Pulitzer Prizes for his reporting, along with a lifetime of recognition and honors.
From 1969 to 2001, Lewis was a columnist for The New York Times until he retired in 2001. His column was called “Abroad at Home” or “At Home Abroad.” His column appeared on the Op-Ed page. Lewis traveled at home, and abroad.
From 1948 to 1952, Lewis worked for the Sunday Department of The New York Times.
By 1952, Lewis was a general assignment reporter for the Washington Daily News. From 1955 to 1964, Lewis reported the Washington, D.C bureau of the New York Times.
In 1955, Lewis covered the Supreme Court, the Justice Dept. and other legal subjects when he was based in Washington, D.C.
Lewis won his first Pulitzer Prize in 1955 for national reporting on a series of his articles on the dismissal of a Navy employee as a security risk. The Navy employee was reinstated because of Lewis’s reporting, according to The New York Times.
From 1956 to 1957 he was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard and studied law.
By 1963, Lewis won his second Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the Supreme Court. In 1969 to 1972, Lewis was The New York Times London chief bureau.
Lewis wrote three books: “Gideon’s Trumpet,” published in 1964, about a landmark Supreme Court case giving impoverished criminal defendants the right to an attorney, “Portrait of a Decade,” about the great changes in American race relations, and “Make No Law,” published in 1991 by Random House, about The New York Times v. Sullivan case, the landmark Supreme Court decision which changed the course of First Amendment litigation in America, according to his bio on The New York Times.
