Thomas L. Stokes covered Washington, D.C., for Scripps-Howard organizations for more than thirty-five years. His work included reporting, editing, and column writing, and his contributions won him a variety of honors ranging from election as president of the Washington Gridiron Club to a Pulitzer Prize in 1939 for his 1938 coverage of corruption in the Kentucky Works Progress Administration program. Stokes was briefly a war reporter in the 1940s but is chiefly known for his coverage of virtually every phase of national government during the 1920s and 1930s and for his political columns beginning in 1944.

Thomas Lunsford Stokes, Jr., was born 1 November 1898 in Atlanta, Georgia, near the home of Evan P. Howell, who had retired the previous year as editor of the Atlanta Constitution and later became mayor of Atlanta. His youth, as recounted in his autobiography, Chip off My Shoulder (1940), was filled with poignant scenes of a quiet...