In his long career as journalist, author and producer, Nicholas Gage has spent the first half as an investigative reporter and foreign correspondent and the second writing seven books and producing several films, one of which was nominated for an Academy Award as best picture.
As a reporter for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and the Associated Press, he received wide recognition for his investigative articles on organized crime, drug trafficking and political corruption. (He obtained the first Nixon tapes in the Watergate scandal.) Abroad, he covered numerous wars and revolutions, including the Iranian uprising that toppled the Shah. He was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize six times and received numerous awards for his reporting, including the Newspaper Guild’s Page One prize for investigative reporting and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism Alumni Award for distinguished career achievement. His adventures as an investigative reporter were dramatized in a CBS television series, The Andros Targets.
His books include Greek Fire, A Place for Us, and Eleni, his account of his mother’s life and death during the Greek Civil War. Translated into 29 languages, it was nominated as best biography of the year by the National Book Critics Circle and received the top literary prize of 1984 from the Royal Society of Literature of Great Britain. “If Eleni were fiction, it would bear the mark of genius,” wrote The New York Review of Books about the memoir.
Gage’s next book, A Place For Us, was widely praised as a moving saga of the immigrant experience, whose writing, Time magazine said in its review, “echoes Checkov.” His most recent work, Greek Fire, is a dual biography of Maria Callas and Aristotle Onassis. The book, wrote The Washington Post, “illuminates not only its subjects but the craft of biography as well.”
In between writing books, he has worked in motion pictures, serving as co-producer of the film version of Eleni and as co-executive producer of The Godfather Part III, which was nominated for an Oscar as best picture in 1994.
In recognition for his work, he has received five honorary degrees, including a doctorate in 1985 from Boston University, where he gave the commencement address.
Mr. Gage, who established a scholarship fund at Boston University in memory of his mother, has been active in a number of philanthropic and human rights organizations for which he has raised several million dollars.
He is married to Columbia Journalism School classmate Joan Paulson and they are the parents of three children: Christos, a screenwriter in Los Angeles; Eleni, a magazine writer in New York, who published her first book, North of Ithaka, in 2006, and Marina, a designer in Boston.
