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Pulitzer Prize-winner Anthony Lewis dies at 85

Two-time Pulitzer winner Anthony Lewis, whose New York Times column championed liberal causes for three decades, died Monday. He was 85.

Lewis worked for 32 years as a columnist for The New York Times, taking up causes such as free speech, human rights and constitutional law.

His Pulitzers came during his years as a reporter. He won his first in 1955 for defending a Navy civilian falsely accused of being a communist sympathizer, and he won again in 1963 for reporting on the Supreme Court.

His acclaimed 1964 book, “Gideon’s Trumpet,” told the story of a petty thief whose fight for legal representation led to a landmark Supreme Court decision.

Lewis was married to Margaret Marshall, former chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. She retired in 2010 to spend more time with her husband after he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. A court spokeswoman confirmed his death.

Lewis saw himself as a defender of decency, respect for law and reason against a tide of religious fundamentalism and extreme nationalism. His columns railed against the Vietnam War, Watergate, apartheid in South Africa and Israeli settlements in the West Bank and Gaza.

He wrote his final “Abroad at Home” column for The Times on Dec. 15, 2001, warning against the U.S. fearfully surrendering its civil liberties in the wake of the terrorist attacks three months earlier.

“The hard question is whether our commitment to law will survive the new sense of vulnerability that is with us all after Sept. 11,” he wrote. “It is easy to tolerate dissent when we feel safe.”

Gail Collins, then the editorial page editor of the Times, said when Lewis resigned that he had been an inspiration.

“His fearlessness, the clarity of his writing and his commitment to human rights and civil liberties are legendary,” Collins said. “And he’s also one of the kindest people I have ever known.”

“Gideon’s Trumpet” became a legal classic, telling the story of Clarence Earl Gideon, whose case resulted in the creation of the public defender systems across the U.S. In Gideon v. Wainwright, the high court ruled that criminal defendants are entitled to a lawyer even if they cannot afford one.

Gideon’s victory, Lewis wrote, “shows that even the poorest and least powerful of men — a convict with not even a friend to visit him in prison — can take his cause to the highest court in the land and bring about a fundamental change in the law.”

The best-selling book was later made into a television movie starring Henry Fonda.

Fighting for the underdog was a theme for Lewis. He won his first Pulitzer Prize at the age of 28 for a series of articles in the Washington Daily News that were judged responsible for clearing a civilian employee of the U.S. Navy from allegations that he was a security risk.

Lewis said Abraham Chasanow was a middle-class man, uninterested in politics, who was terrorized by the federal loyalty-security program of the 1950s when unnamed informants alleged Chasanow was a radical communist sympathizer.

Lewis, a Cambridge resident, was a 1948 graduate of Harvard College.