Historian John Adalbert Lukacs (Lukács János Albert, January 31, 1924 – May 6, 2019) was born in Budapest to a Roman Catholic father and Jewish mother. His parents divorced when he was eight and he was raised as a Catholic by his mother who had recently converted. An Anglophile, she sent Lukacs to boarding school in England for two summers to learn English. Lukacs survived the German occupation of Hungary (1944-45), despite being forced to work in a Hungarian labor battalion. By the end of 1944 he had escaped the battalion and took cover in a cellar until the end of the war. He completed an advanced degree in History at the University of Budapest in 1946. Lukacs fled Hungary for the United States later that year, following the installation of the communist regime.

After a year spent lecturing part-time at Columbia, in 1947 John Lukacs became Professor of History at Chestnut Hill College in Philadelphia, a Roman Catholic (then) women’s college where he remained until his retirement in 1994. Lukacs wrote in English and Hungarian and authored over thirty monographs, chiefly on history, and hundreds of articles, reviews, and essays. His writing often concerned events leading up to World War II, its major figures (notably Winston Churchill, Adolf Hitler, and Joseph Stalin), and on the events of World War II in Europe. He wrote extensively about the Cold War and published several works on historical philosophy, as well.

John Lukacs often wrote on politically conservative convictions and voiced anti-communist views of the Cold War. However, he disagreed with McCarthyism and was critical of the American right regarding trends toward populism, expressions he saw as dangerous forms of nationalism, and on issues American military intervention abroad. Lukacs characterized himself as a traditionalist, a patriot, and a reactionary. He saw cultural decline in the rise of materialism and veneration of technology.

Lukacs was married three times, to Helen Schofield (died in 1971), to Stephanie Harvey (died in 2003) and then to Pamela Hall (divorced). He lived in Phoenixville, Pennsylvania from the 1950s until his death in 2019.