Gage's subsequent book, A Place for Us, tells what happened to Nick and his sisters after they set sail for America to live with the father they had not seen in a decade. It is a definitive story of the modern immigrant experience, relating the triumphs, heartbreaks, and misadventures of the children as they try to assimilate to their new country and stern but well-meaning father.

When he stepped off the ship in New York harbor, Nick Gage was a nine-year-old boy who knew no English but he quickly learned the language of his new country and, encouraged by a junior high school teacher, began to write. He won a scholarship to Boston University's School of Public Communications, and in 1963 he received the Hearst Award for the best college journalist from John F. Kennedy at the White House. In 1964 Gage earned a master's degree from Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism and began a reporting career that took him to The Associated Press. The Boston Herald Traveler, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times, where he worked from 1970 to 1980 as an investigative reporter and a foreign correspondent. During those years he wrote three books on organized crime and two novels and received the Newspaper Guild's Page One Award and the Sigma Delta Chi prize for his reporting.

Nicholas Gage with Jackie Callas, Maria's older sister, and her
husband, Dr. Andreas Stathopoulos, at their home in Athens

Gage left the Times in 1980 to fulfill a lifelong ambition and write the story of his mother's life and death. The book, Eleni, published by Random House in 1983, was a Book-of-the-Month Club main selection, was nominated as the best biography by the National Book Critics' Circle, and he was awarded the Heinemann Prize for best book of 1984 by the Royal Society of Literature of Great Britain. The motion picture Eleni, starring John Malkovich and Kate Nelligan, was released in 1985.

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