Jimmy Breslin Honored by Library of America

Dan Barry curates a selection that would make him proud; that should be in every school library in the country.

Music has Beethoven, Mozart, Beyonce, Sinatra, Madonna, and Cher. Basketball has Jordan and LeBron. Baseball has Ruth, Aaron. Mantle, Jeter. There’s Ali in Boxing. Literature has Shakespeare. In politics, there is Lincoln and Eisenhower. In almost every discipline, you will find people who become so well known by what they do that they become recognizable by a single name.

In journalism that name is Breslin.

The story of Jimmy Breslin is the story of the last half of the 20th Century. It is a story that mixes a master class in reporting with stories of how people live as seen through the eyes of a man who was willing to climb flights of stairs to tell them.

Now, Breslin’s role as a chronicler of the United States as it lurched toward the 21st century has been cemented in place by the decision of Library of America to publish a collection of his journalism. The Library describes their mission as helping “to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing and keeping in print, authoritative editions of America’s best and most significant writing.”

Since its founding, the Library has published more than 300 volumes collecting the work of around 200 individual writers. Of those, including Breslin, around five have been journalists.

In this collection, beautifully curated by Dan Barry of The New York Times, an amazing reporter and writer admired Breslin, the reader sees why Breslin is credited with creating the modern newspaper column, showing generations that followed that the only way to get the story is to leave the office. Again and again for more than 50 years, he demonstrated that a columnist can cover the news as if writing a short story.

From focusing on the way a ring belonging to union boss Tony Provenzano caught the sun as he walked down the steps of a courthouse to describing a detective reaching for a folder detailing a murder case to capturing the fear of a woman climbing the stairs of her apartment building while carrying groceries as she notices a man following her, Breslin filled his columns with the details of the way that people live their lives.

He also mastered the art of zigging while everyone else zagged, eschewing pack journalism, It was a technique on display when he covered the assassination of President Kennedy. Twice in three days, he raised the bar, writing the pieces that are still read – and taught – today. One piece looked at the surgeon who struggled to save the president’s life, the other focused on the man who dug the president’s grave.

“Clifton Pollard wasn’t at the funeral,” Breslin wrote of the gravedigger in a column headlined, ‘It’s an Honor.’

“He was over behind the hill, digging graves for $3.01 an hour in another section of the cemetery. He didn’t know who the graves were for. Hey was just digging them and then covering with them boards.”

“‘They’ll be used,’ he said. ‘We just don’t know when.’”

“‘I tried to go over and see the grave,’ he said. ‘But it was so crowded a soldier told me I couldn’t get through. So I just stayed here and worked, sir. But I’ll get over there later a little bit. Just look over and see how it is, you know. Like I told you, it’s an honor.’”

In a more than 50-year career, Breslin’s primary professional homes were The New York Herald-Tribune, New York Daily News, and New York Newsday. His work also appeared in magazines and newspapers around the country from True Magazine in the 50s, to New York Magazine, of which he was one of the founding writers, to Playboy, The Saturday Evening Post, The New York Post (when it was a liberal bastion), and The New York Times.

Barry includes sux magazine pieces, 67 columns and two complete books – How the Good Guys Finally Won: Notes from an Impeachment Summer (about Watergate) and The Short Sweet Dream of Eduardo Gutierrez (a Mexican immigrant in the United States illegally who died in what was described as a construction accident but should be called construction neglect).

Breslin liked to talk about the importance of using a single person to tell a larger story, saying, “You get a little picture that reflects the whole. You can get the readers interested in the life of one guy and he can reflect the whole life around him. And it’s a better picture than the political can give.”

It’s possible that if one were to look through history, there are few examples of reporters doing this as well as Breslin does in Short, Sweet Dream.

“Eduardo was stunned by the bathroom. Never before had he seen one in a house. With nine people and one bathroom, there was an implied agreement that each would take no more than 10 minutes, He soon learned that each time somebody slipped past him, it would be 10 minutes of listening to running water. Let three get ahead of you and you lose half an hour.”

The book is organized into four main sections: columns and other journalism 1960-1974, How the Good Guys Finally Won, Columns 1976-2004, and Short Sweet Dream.

The first section collects some of Breslin’s columns for the Herald-Tribune in its different iterations, in New York Magazine (the offspring of the Herald-Tribune, and some other magazine pieces,

In the first section, there is Breslin reporting on the death of Winston Churchill… “He died wordlessly. He was a man who put deep brass and powerful strings into words, and then built them up to a drum roll to reach out and grab people and shake them by their shoulders and in their hearts.”

Breslin is there as Malcolm X is gunned down in the Audubon Ballroom, writing of his killers, “They had come to the Audubon Ballroom, this old wooden-floored dance hall and they murdered Malcolm and then ran from the place while his 37-year-old wife Betty was screaming, ‘They’re killing my husband.’ Then she turned and ran back to the stage and bent over him.”

He is in Alabama as Black people try to vote and Black school children are forced to use textbooks dating back to the 1930s, and in Vietnam, a war that took the lives of so many that deserved better.

“Now they were coming out into this sand with the bushes and the fire was coming at them. Not concentrated fire. But a shot here, a shot here, a machine gun from somewhere else, and all of it coming from holes and bunkers as they come through the sand, with the bushes tearing their hands. Every few minutes, Michaels, who was carrying the radio, would hear something on it and he’s call over to those around him.

“‘Smith got hit. He’s dead.’”

The reader is there as The World Journal Tribune closes, the forced marriage of three papers that had once been successful. Suddenly, they were being tossed into the garbage bin of memory. Breslin wrote of the paper’s excellence, not just journalistically but as a place to have a job.

He writes of one of his editors bringing one of Jimmy’s columns back saying, “‘Now look, I don’t want you to make yourself look bad by going off here.’ Always with class. He would take a chance that would raise your hair, too. It was a beautiful way to work and now the room was dark and stuffy and I wanted to get out of there.”

Breslin’s columns over the years were populated that people might had never heard of but certainly knew from their own lives. There was Marvin the Torch, an arsonist who described his work as building empty lots. There was Fat Thomas, a bookmaker, Shelly the Bail Bondsman, and there was Klein the Lawyer, a defense attorney. All were from Breslin’s beloved Queens Boulevard.

While most know them from Breslin’s time at the Daily News, Klein and Shelley were first immortalized in a story he wrote for The New York Times about the upcoming Super Bowl.

At one point. then New York Times metro editor Abe Rosenthal cast doubt on some of Breslin’s characters. Breslin took him to Pep McGuire’s. a bar in Queens frequented by many of them. They were all there.

Meanwhile, he wrote so convincingly of a fictional mob boss that the Arizona State Police put out an APB for him.

In 1976, Breslin returned to full time column-writing when he took a job at the News. He came out of the gate hot, writing about a teen who was murdered for his coat; again, it shows Breslin using the story of one person to paint the larger picture.

“Dies the victim, dies the city. Nobody flees New York because of accounting malpractice, People run from murder and fire. Those who remain express their fear in words and anger.”

Over the next 30 years, Breslin used his column to take readers on trips involving comedy and tragedy. There are perhaps no two more powerful columns than the ones Breslin wrote about the two Rosemarys in his life, his wife and his daughter. Both of whom died way too early.

“As it was with the mother who went before her, the last breath for the daughter was made before an onlooker with frightened eyes,” he wrote after Rosemary the daughter died.

He wrote with an eye for details, a pen filled with empathy. When AIDS ravaged New York in the 1980s, few mainstream papers were paying attention, Breslin wrote of people with AIDS and showed that they were people; not statistics, not stereotypes, not people to be afraid of, just individuals worthy of concern.

It was those columns that won Breslin the Pulitzer Prize in 1986.

I do not envy Barry, having to whittle Breslin’s output down to one volume. His magazine work went from the 1950s through the 200s and covered a wide range of topics as only he could. His work in this regard can be found in many anthologies, particularly those related to true crime and sports.

His newspaper columns were plentiful, written over almost 50 years. The ones not included could easily make up another volume. Or two.

His columns on the corruption during the Koch Administration that had many of Jimmy’s friends at the center of it could probably fill a book on their own. As could his writings on his family and friends.

And the books. Two of his first five books – Can’t Anybody Here Play this Game (about the woeful first season of The New York Mets) and The Gang that Couldn’t Shoot Straight (a comic novel about a bunch of mobsters) are as fresh today as when he wrote them.

Breslin used to say that he found great motivation in the story of Wally Pipp, a former first baseman for The New York Yankees. One day, Pipp, hungover, said he couldn’t play because of a headache. His manager tapped a young player named Lou Gehrig to play for him. Gehrig played the next 2,129 consecutive games.

The lesson is if you can walk and talk you can work. If you don’t, maybe there’s someone who will.

Breslin had a lot to teach everyone. Read the book. And, if Jimmy’s writings aren’t enough, longer over the notes and chronology that Dan put together.

Barry is a storyteller and reporter in Breslin’s mode. This shines through in through in those two sections, sections filled with information, context, and more good writing than you’d ever expect to find in a footnote.

Buy the book for yourself.  But it for your friends. then buy it for those you don’t like because maybe they’ll learn something.

Thank you, Breslin. Thank you, Dan Barry.