The Washington Times ran my On Crime column today on Jimmy Breslin.
You can read the column via the below link or the below text:
Author Richard Esposito discusses the legacy of New York columnist Jimmy Breslin - Washington Times
Although I disagreed with Jimmy Breslin’s politics, I always
read his newspaper columns, magazine pieces and books. I always found his work
unique and interesting. I particularly liked his crime novel, “The Gang That
Couldn’t Shoot Straight.”
I enjoyed
reading about him in Richard Esposito’s “Jimmy Breslin: The Man Who Told the
Truth.” I contacted him and asked why he wrote the book.
“Jimmy Breslin was
one of the most influential journalists of the second half of the 20th century
and right through the first decade of the 21st. His contribution to millions of
readers and their understanding of politics, crime, government was enormous,
his contribution to hundreds of young reporters as a mentor and as a role model
for great, precise reporting was also enormous, and his reinvention, in the
early 1960s, of journalistic storytelling with his “new journalism” colleagues,
changed the nature of narrative story-telling,” Mr. Esposito replied.
How would you describe him as a man, newspaper reporter, and
columnist?
“There was no
hardworking, more exhaustive reporter than Jimmy, and there was no one more exhausting to
work with. Period. I did it as a copy boy - one of many to buy him coffee, run
his column across the newsroom, get him money, always broke, always in need of
money. And I did it as a city editor. And in the course of writing the book, I
learned even more about just how exhausting he was with hours on the phone,
cajoling, reporting, yelling and prying. He was relentless. And he was, as I
said, simply exhausting because his world revolved completely around himself.”
Who were his major influences?
“Jimmy was
influenced, in many ways, by the great sports writers who came before him.
Depending on the day, he credited any number of journalists with being his most
important influences. But through it all there was Damon Runyon. For Jimmy, Runyon
was a role model.”
How did his newspaper column differ from other columns from his era? Why did he move his column from newspaper to newspaper?
“Jimmy acted more like a journeyman than a star. He was constantly searching for a better home. If you looked at it in light of a childhood where he, his mother and his sister were abandoned to penury by his father, you could see it as a pattern of his life. Love, then anger and betrayal. He quit, in a sense, before he thought you were going to abandon him. This was all inside him of course. But the emotions were there in his writing. Rage, anger, the defense of the helpless. All of this was Jimmy in his columns. He differed from the other columnists in many ways. In his columns, in essence, he wrote poetry for a cab driver, his simple sentences were the bricks of his story telling, his sense of humor lifted the entire paper, giving it a life it otherwise might not have had. These are just a few of the ways he differed. No one worked harder than Jimmy Breslin.”
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