Lucian K. Truscott IV

He is a member of the Monticello Association, the members of which descend from Thomas Jefferson, who was Truscott's 6th-great-grandfather. The association owns the graveyard at Monticello. During a November 1998 appearance on the Oprah Winfrey Show he invited descendants of Sally Hemings to the family reunion in 2000. The Hemings descendants had not been allowed to join the association, or to be buried in its graveyard.

Truscott's first novel, Dress Gray, was about a West Point cadet who was found dead. It was a bestseller, appearing thirteen weeks on The New York Times hardcover bestseller list and seven weeks on the paperback list. In The New York Times, Gene Lyons wrote the book was "as compelling and important a popular novel has emerged or is likely to emerge from the Vietnam era." It was made into a two-part television movie in 1986, starring Hal Holbrook, Eddie Albert, and Alec Baldwin; Gore Vidal wrote the screenplay.

Truscott attended the United States Military Academy, graduating in 1969. In 1968, Truscott and other cadets challenged the required attendance at chapel services. Later a court case filed by another cadet along with midshipmen at the United States Naval Academy resulted in a 1972 US Court of Appeals decision (and upheld by the Supreme Court) that ended mandatory chapel attendance at all of the service academies. He was then assigned to Fort Carson, Colorado. There, he wrote an article about heroin addiction among enlisted soldiers and another about what he felt was an illegal court martial. He was threatened with being sent to Vietnam, so he resigned his commission about thirteen months after graduating, receiving a "general discharge under other than honorable conditions."

Starting in 1970, he joined The Village Voice as a freelancer and later staff writer. He had previously written for the Voice as a cadet, submitting "conservative, right-wing letters" that the newspaper eventually started to publish. One such letter, describing Christmas 1968 among the hippies at the Electric Circus nightclub, was published as a front-page story. Another piece, written a few weeks after he graduated from West Point, described the riot at the Stonewall Inn on June 27, 1969.

Lucian King Truscott IV (born April 11, 1947) is an American writer and journalist. A former staff writer for The Village Voice, he is the author of several military-themed novels including Dress Gray, which was adapted into a 1986 television film of the same name.