As a moonlighting author, Kluger published two novels, When the Bough Breaks and National Anthem, satirizing American social mores. Moved by the social upheavals sweeping across the US in the 1960s, Kluger left book publishing and devoted six years, starting in 1968, to researching and writing Simple Justice (1976), generally regarded as the definitive account of the US Supreme Court’s 1954 landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision outlawing racially segregated public schools. His second nonfiction work was The Paper: The Life and Death of the New York Herald Tribune (1986). Both were National Book Award finalists. Ashes to Ashes, his following book, is a critical history of the cigarette industry and its lethal toll on the public’s health; it won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction in 1997. Kluger went on to write three other works of history, dealing with the relentless expansion of America’s national boundaries, a tragic mid-19th century clash between white settlers and tribal natives in territorial Washington, and the 1735 trial of John Peter Zenger and the origins of press freedom in the New World.
Of his seven novels, the most widely read are Members of the Tribe and The Sheriff of Nottingham, both anchored in historical events. Two of his novels were co-authored with his wife Phyllis, who often assisted him with research for his historical works. The Klugers have lived near San Francisco since 2003.
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