He also found inspiration for his work from his experience as an undergraduate at the University of North Carolina--Chapel Hill (UNC), he said. Mayer, who grew up in a small North Carolina town, said he met a black student at college who had an entirely different life experience than his.
As a result, the 1963 graduate got involved in the civil rights movement at UNC.
"I think at some level I'm writing this book to pull together" the different paths of his experience and of the national experience regarding race Mayer said.
Coyne's forthcoming Viking Penguin work, though also a historical book, is narrower in scope than Mayer's.
He was relieved to have won this "enormous gift" for the work, The Best Years of Their Lives.The book follows the lives of six Freehold, N.J. men through World War II and then their return home to create--and partially lose--a sense of community in the postwar years.
The Freehold resident, who has been working on the book off and on since 1995, said he stopped working on his book fulltime and returned to reporting part-time at the Asbury Park Press when he ran out of money.
With the receipt of the award, he has quit reporting to focus on the completion of his book, which he "can finish a lot more quickly" as a result, he said.
"I always wanted to write this book," said Coyne, who added that his idea got turned down by book publishers a few times before it was finally approved at Viking Penguin in 1995, once his two other books had been published.
Coyne, the author of Domers: A Year at Notre Dame and A Day in the Night of America, which describes night workers throughout the U.S., attributed his final success with a publishing house to the 50th anniversary celebrations of WWII earlier this decade.
He said he hopes to finish his book by the early fall and have it published sometime next year.
The Lukas Prize Project was established in 1998 in memory of Lukas, who died in 1997.
A two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and recipient of the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, Lukas, a former Crimson managing editor, wrote five books.
Among his most noted were Common Ground, which examined the impact of school desegregation in Boston, and the posthumously published Big Trouble, which described turn-of-the-century class conflict in Idaho.
Coyne said he was inspired by Common Ground, praising it as the "most amazing work of reporting and narrative."
The awards program is sponsored by the family of the late Mark Lynton, a Dutch historian and business executive.
Over 150 applicants competed for this year's three prizes.