Awards

Pulitzer Prize - 1941

Correspondence Group Award

About Jean A. Graffis

Jean Graffis received an A.B. from IU Bloomington in 1930, and undertook graduate work at Columbia University in 1930 and again from 1938 to 1939. He worked as a newspaper editor and reporter from 1917 to 1936, a news-pictures services editor from 1936 to 1939, and as a chief news editor for the Newspaper Enterprise Association (NEA) and Acme Pictures in Paris and Berlin from 1939 to 1942. During World War II, he served overseas as a commissioned officer in the U.S. Navy (1943-1946). After the war, he was a business press specialist in the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), an information officer in the Foreign Service Auxiliary in Paris, a Foreign Service Reserve Officer in Paris, and an information and editorial specialist for the Department of State's Division of International Motion Pictures.

Graffis was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in Correspondence as part of the Group Award in 1941. The Group Award was awarded, "In place of an individual Pulitzer Prize for foreign correspondence, the Trustees approved the recommendation of the Advisory Board that a bronze plaque or scroll be designed and executed to recognize and symbolize the public services and the individual achievements of American news reporters in the war zones of Europe, Asia and Africa from the beginning of the present war."

Graffis passed away March 7, 1972, in Saginaw, Michigan.