In Letter to a Man in the Fire, the late writer and longtime Duke professor Reynolds Price ’55 makes an eloquent case for the existence of a caring God. He pauses at one point in this extended essay, which draws on his own nearly fatal battle with cancer, to acknowledge that his sincere hope for an afterlife “would seem lunatic to many of my university and writing colleagues.”

Photos courtesy Ed Nixon

 

Cornelia B. Grumman calls herself "an accidental editorial writer." But the Pulitzer Prize she received in 2003 for her work at the Chicago Tribune has a lot more to do with passion than with chance.

Robert Korstad had many places to dig as he researched a historic labor struggle in Winston-Salem, North Carolina--one that pitted a fledgling union of largely impoverished black workers against manufacturing giant R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company. He interviewed dozens of union workers and activists who had fought for wage gains and better working conditions throughout the 1940s.

Some Duke graduates are watching with interest as the Atlantic Coast Conference fights a lawsuit brought against it by the Big East, a