EULOGY

By NICHOLAS LEMANN

Tony Lukas believed in and devoted his life to the magical power of a certain kind of journalism: the long, intensely reported, painstakingly constructed narrative showing the great historical themes of our national life playing themselves out across the lives of ordinary Americans. He worked hard at this himself, and he also worked hard to encourage other journalists who were interested in the kind of reporting and writing that he was. At the time of his death, he had just finished an ambitious work on a sensational early 20th century murder trial in Idaho.

As great journalists often are, Tony was fundamentally an outsider and a loner. He went at the world with a ferocious curiosity: he needed to know every detail of what had happened, every nuance of motive and consequence. The last time we had dinner he mentioned that he had wanted to add to his Idaho book a bit of last-minute material on the press coverage of the trial--so he had got the registry of press credentials granted (more than three-quarters of a century ago) and assembled a file on every person on the list. This was a man whose book was finished and who was at an age when most journalists have settled into the study to write their memoirs.

What drove Tony was the prospect of creating journalism with all the life and immediacy of great fiction and the additional power of truth. He wanted to show America to itself so vividly as to spur the national conscience. It worked too. Every subject he wrote about remains lodged in the mind through the personification that he found for it, from Linda Fitzpatrick, the suburban girl who became fatally involved with the late-1960s counterculture, to Rachel Twymon, the Job-like Boston-ghetto mother in Common Ground. They may be gone now, but they're still alive in Tony's work. And so is he.

--By Nicholas Lemann