Anthony Lewis - Biography

Biography

His first Pulitzer Prize was in 1955, during the period of McCarthyism, for reporting on the U.S. government's loyalty program; he reported specifically on the dismissal of Abraham Chasanow, a US Navy employee who was not informed of the nature of the accusations against him, nor of his accusers. Lewis's articles led to the employee's reinstatement. This story was fictionalized in the movie Three Brave Men starring Ernest Borgnine and Ray Milland. He won a second Pulitzer Prize in 1963 for his coverage of the United States Supreme Court. He has frequently written on the Court and matters of constitutional law.

Lewis has taught at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism since the mid-'70s, and has held the school's James Madison chair in First Amendment Issues since 1982. He lectured at Harvard from 1974 to 1989 and has been a visiting lecturer at several other colleges and universities, including the Universities of Arizona, California, Illinois, and Oregon.

Anthony Lewis was born in New York City; he attended the Horace Mann School in New York (where one of his classmates was Roy Cohn) and Harvard College, where he earned a A.B. in 1948. While at Harvard, he was an editor of the Harvard Crimson. He is on the board of directors of the Committee to Protect Journalists.

In 1983, Lewis received the Elijah Parish Lovejoy Award as well as an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from Colby College. On January 8, 2001, he was presented with the Presidential Citizens Medal by President Clinton. On October 21, 2008, Lewis was honored by the National Coalition Against Censorship for his work in the area of First Amendment rights and free expression.

Noam Chomsky has said that Anthony Lewis is at "the far left of the spectrum" that is available in the mainstream media, and thus is useful in discovering the tacit assumptions that underlie all mainstream discussion. Henry Kissinger reportedly once said that Anthony Lewis is "always wrong", which Lewis attributed to his own open dislike of Kissinger.

He is Jewish and married to retired Chief Justice Margaret H. Marshall of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, who was formerly the General Counsel and Vice-President at Harvard University. He has three children from his first marriage, Eliza, David, and Mia, and seven grandchildren: Zoe, Miranda, Lily, Thea, Evie, Beatrice and Jack.

Lewis and his wife are longtime residents of Cambridge, Massachusetts.