Jones won the Pulitzer Prize for his reportage of the story. In 1991 they co-authored The Patriarch: The Rise and Fall of the Bingham Dynasty, a book on the Louisville newspaper owners. In 1999, the pair co-authored The Trust: The Private and Powerful Family Behind The New York Times, the first full-scale portrait of Adolph Ochs and his descendants. The book won the A. M. Sperber Award for Exceptional Achievement in Writing and Research and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in biography. Academic From 1998 to 2009, Tifft served as the Eugene C. Patterson Professor of the Practice of Journalism at the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University. She shared the Patterson chair with Jones until the fall of 2000, when she became the sole Patterson professor. During this time she also served as a member of the Duke Magazine editorial advisory board. Tifft was a popular professor who received good ratings from students, although she was very demanding. Sanford School dean Bruce Kuniholm noted that "she'd make them write and rewrite and rewrite. They learned so much from her." Tifft considered teaching the most important work of her life. In 2009, the Sanford School established an undergraduate teaching award in Tifft's name. Personal life Tifft met her husband, Alex Jones, during post-graduate studies at Harvard in 1981-82. They married in 1985. Death Tifft was diagnosed with metastatic endometrial cancer on August 7, 2007, and began chemotherapy on August 27. Throughout her treatment she wrote extensively in a blog documenting her disease and its treatment in a "breezy, up-tempo" way, sometimes under the byline of "Cancer Chick." Tifft entered hospice care at her Massachusetts apartment on March 23, 2010. She died there on the morning of April 1 in the company of her husband, brother, sister, and sister-in-law. Husband Alex Jones established the Susan Tifft Fund at Duke University in her memory, providing internship funds and research grants for undergraduate students in journalism or media studies. References External links American women journalists Duke University faculty Duke University Trinity College of Arts and Sciences alumni Time (magazine) people People from Rumford, Maine 1951 births 2010 deaths Harvard Kennedy School alumni American women academics 21st-century American women