Jimmy Breslin Biography Quotes 15 Report mistakes

Early Life and Background
Jimmy Breslin was born in 1928 in Queens, New York, and grew up in a working-class world that would shape his voice and his subjects for decades. Raised largely by his mother, he absorbed the cadences of New York streets and the stories of people who moved the city but rarely appeared in headlines. He attended local schools in Queens and began chasing newspaper work as a teenager, developing a reputation early for speed, wit, and a stubborn zeal for the underdog.

Entry into Journalism
Breslin started in sports, a common proving ground in the city's dailies. He covered games, locker rooms, and managers with an eye for detail, learning how to spot telling moments and plainspoken characters who could carry a story. His book about the hapless 1962 New York Mets, Can't Anybody Here Play This Game?, and his sketches of Casey Stengel, revealed a voice already tuned to humor, pathos, and the quiet dignity of those who did hard jobs in public view.

Becoming New York's Columnist
He moved from sports to general column writing and became a star at the New York Herald Tribune under editor James Bellows, where a new, narrative-driven style of reporting flourished alongside writers like Tom Wolfe. Breslin then wrote for the New York Daily News and later Newsday, returning to the Daily News near the end of his career. Across these papers he developed a signature approach: when catastrophe or spectacle struck, he found the person on the edge of the frame and put that person at the center. After the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, he sought out Clifton Pollard, the gravedigger at Arlington National Cemetery, and wrote about the man who quietly performed the last service for a fallen leader. The column became a classic.

Signature Columns and Public Moments
In 1977, as the Son of Sam murders convulsed New York, David Berkowitz sent a letter to Breslin at the Daily News. Breslin published portions, collaborated with law enforcement, and wrote about the public fear with a mixture of caution and urgency. He used the letter not to sensationalize the killer, but to reflect how a city absorbs dread and then marches on. Earlier and later, he wrote relentlessly about municipal politics and the everyday machinery of power. He skewered bosses and dealmakers, notably in Queens during the era that included Donald Manes's downfall, and he kept up a steady critique of mayors, commissioners, and real estate titans who, in his view, forgot the people who rode the subways and paid the rents.

Books and Longer Works
Breslin wrote with equal vigor at book length. The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight, a comic novel about mobsters and the urban stage they misused, became a staple of American popular culture. World Without End, Amen and Table Money drew on Irish American life and the gritty trades that tunnel under and build up the city. How the Good Guys Finally Won captured the strategy and legislative muscle behind the end of the Nixon presidency, with figures like House Speaker Tip O'Neill cast in the roles of patient stewards rather than bomb-throwers. He later wrote The Short Sweet Dream of Eduardo Gutierrez, about an immigrant worker's fatal day on a construction site, and The Good Rat, a true-crime account that probed the crossover of the mob and corrupt law enforcement. His memoir, I Want to Thank My Brain for Remembering Me, described a serious health crisis and his return to writing.

Politics and Public Persona
Breslin was never shy about politics. In 1969 he ran for New York City Council president on a ticket with the novelist Norman Mailer, who sought the mayoralty on a platform that imagined New York City as a 51st state. The effort was quixotic, noisy, and pure New York theater, but it clarified Breslin's belief that politics was not a distant spectacle; it lived in neighborhoods, in precinct houses, at bakery counters, and in the corridors where influence moved. He roamed those corridors with a pocket notebook and a blunt sense of who was shading the truth.

Voice, Style, and Influence
Breslin's column was the gold standard of urban reportage for a generation. He championed sanitation workers, hospital attendants, firefighters, cops, teachers, and the newly arrived immigrant who built and cleaned the city. He was equally hard on public officials who failed them. His sentences were short, ironed flat of pretense, but vivid with detail and ear-perfect dialogue. He shared a newsroom and a city with other legendary columnists, notably Pete Hamill, and the two shaped how New Yorkers read about themselves. Editors and writers across the country studied his work to learn how to capture a voice on the page without smoothing away the city's rough edges.

Controversy and Accountability
His fierce temperament sometimes brought trouble. In the 1990s he unleashed a widely criticized tirade at a colleague, laced with sexist and racist language. After a public outcry, he apologized and stepped back from his column briefly. He later returned with an awareness that a columnist's power required restraint as well as nerve. The episode did not erase his body of work, but it complicated his public portrait and became part of the story he told about himself in later years.

Personal Life
Breslin's personal world was threaded through his columns. He wrote about his family with tenderness and restraint, shared grief when illness struck, and acknowledged his decision to leave alcohol behind in middle age. After the death of his first wife, he married Ronnie Eldridge, a prominent public figure in New York civic life. Friends, sources, and adversaries often overlapped in Breslin's orbit; he could quarrel with a mayor at noon and be walking a beat with a patrol officer by sundown. The intimacy of his city relationships gave his work both its immediacy and its moral stakes.

Later Years
Even as he aged, Breslin found new stories. He covered the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, writing about firefighters, emergency workers, and the families waiting at kitchen tables for the phone to ring. When some writers turned to abstraction, he stayed with names, blocks, and small acts of bravery that accumulate into the life of a city. He continued to file for newspapers on Long Island and in the city, and he returned to the Daily News late in his career, giving readers one more round of sharp, unsentimental dispatches.

Awards and Recognition
In 1986 he won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary, cited for columns that consistently gave voice to ordinary citizens. The honor confirmed what many readers already believed: that Breslin had carved a place beside the best American city columnists and that his blend of reporting and storytelling had become a tradition in its own right. He also received other journalism awards over the years and remained a draw at universities and civic forums where he spoke about reporting as an act of witness.

Legacy and Death
Breslin died in 2017 in New York. By then, his voice had entered the city's myth, the rasp of a man who could be caustic in one paragraph and tender in the next. He left behind legions of reporters who learned to walk toward the quiet corner of a big story, toward the worker, the neighbor, the bystander whose experience carries more truth than the official statement. He also left books that continue to be read for their street-level view of crime, politics, labor, and the lived city. His life traced the arc of postwar New York, from the boroughs to the backrooms to the breaking newsstand, and his work remains a manual for how to write about power and people without confusing the two.

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