Post by Richard Kimble on Mar 19, 2017 20:38:22 GMT
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The author-columnist Jimmy Breslin, a Pulitzer prize-winning chronicler of wise guys and underdogs who became the brash embodiment of the old-time, street smart New Yorker, died on Sunday. He was 87.
Breslin died at his Manhattan home of complications from pneumonia, his stepdaughter, Emily Eldridge, said.
Breslin was a fixture for decades in New York journalism, notably with the New York Daily News. It was Breslin, a rumpled bed of a reporter, who mounted a quixotic political campaign for citywide office in the 60s; who became the Son of Sam’s regular correspondent in the 70s; who exposed the city’s worst corruption scandal in decades in the 80s; who was pulled from a car and stripped to his underwear by Brooklyn rioters in the 90s.
With his uncombed mop of hair and sneering Queens accent, he was like a character right out of his own work, and didn’t mind telling you.
“I’m the best person ever to have a column in this business,” he once boasted. “There’s never been anybody in my league.”
With typical disregard for authority, Breslin once took out a newspaper ad to “fire” ABC when it aired his short-lived TV show in a lousy time slot. The same year, he captured the 1986 Pulitzer for commentary and the George Polk award for metropolitan reporting. More than 20 years earlier, with Gay Talese and Tom Wolfe, he had helped create “New Journalism” – a more literary approach to news reporting.
He was an acclaimed author, too, moving easily between genres. The Gang that Couldn’t Shoot Straight was his comic chronicle of the Brooklyn mob; Damon Runyon: A Life was an account of his spiritual predecessor; I Want to Thank My Brain for Remembering Me was a memoir.
Breslin was to Queens Boulevard what Runyon was to Broadway – columnist, confessor and town crier, from the Pastrami King to Red McGuire’s saloon. He reveled in the borough, even as he moved far beyond it.
The author-columnist Jimmy Breslin, a Pulitzer prize-winning chronicler of wise guys and underdogs who became the brash embodiment of the old-time, street smart New Yorker, died on Sunday. He was 87.
Breslin died at his Manhattan home of complications from pneumonia, his stepdaughter, Emily Eldridge, said.
Breslin was a fixture for decades in New York journalism, notably with the New York Daily News. It was Breslin, a rumpled bed of a reporter, who mounted a quixotic political campaign for citywide office in the 60s; who became the Son of Sam’s regular correspondent in the 70s; who exposed the city’s worst corruption scandal in decades in the 80s; who was pulled from a car and stripped to his underwear by Brooklyn rioters in the 90s.
With his uncombed mop of hair and sneering Queens accent, he was like a character right out of his own work, and didn’t mind telling you.
“I’m the best person ever to have a column in this business,” he once boasted. “There’s never been anybody in my league.”
With typical disregard for authority, Breslin once took out a newspaper ad to “fire” ABC when it aired his short-lived TV show in a lousy time slot. The same year, he captured the 1986 Pulitzer for commentary and the George Polk award for metropolitan reporting. More than 20 years earlier, with Gay Talese and Tom Wolfe, he had helped create “New Journalism” – a more literary approach to news reporting.
He was an acclaimed author, too, moving easily between genres. The Gang that Couldn’t Shoot Straight was his comic chronicle of the Brooklyn mob; Damon Runyon: A Life was an account of his spiritual predecessor; I Want to Thank My Brain for Remembering Me was a memoir.
Breslin was to Queens Boulevard what Runyon was to Broadway – columnist, confessor and town crier, from the Pastrami King to Red McGuire’s saloon. He reveled in the borough, even as he moved far beyond it.
