Murray Kempton Biography Quotes 9 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
Murray Kempton was born in 1917 in Baltimore, Maryland, and came of age in a city where newspapers were central to civic life. He attended Baltimore City College, a storied public high school with a strong tradition in writing and debate, and then studied at Johns Hopkins University, graduating on the eve of the Second World War. The rigorous classical curriculum he encountered there, steeped in history and rhetoric, would leave a permanent mark on his prose and on the ethical seriousness that anchored his reporting.

Entering Journalism
Kempton went to work in newspapers before and after military service in World War II, beginning the slow apprenticeship that once defined American journalism. He developed a habit that would become his signature: bicycling to assignments, noting textures of street life, and returning to his desk to craft sentences that braided fact, memory, and moral inquiry. New York City became his principal theater. He joined the New York Post in an era when Dorothy Schiff presided as publisher and the paper cultivated a lively, liberal voice. His columns and reportage ranged across labor, politics, and the uneasy border where idealism meets power.

Books and Ideas
In 1955 he published Part of Our Time: Some Ruins and Monuments of the Thirties, an inquiry into the American left and the moral costs of enthusiasms born in crisis. The book's portraits of figures such as Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss placed loyalty, betrayal, and memory under a skeptical lens, and it established Kempton as a writer who could find the human drama inside ideological conflict. Later, in The Briar Patch: The People of the State of New York v. Lumumba Shakur et al., he chronicled the Panther 21 case, observing the courtroom fates of Lumumba Shakur and Afeni Shakur and the state's attempt to define militancy as criminality. The book showcased his instinct to attend to persons as well as causes, to hear the cadence of defendants and prosecutors with equal patience.

New York Columnist
As New York politics transformed in the 1960s and 1970s, Kempton wrote about the city's leaders with a mixture of scrutiny and reluctant affection. He reported on the administrations of John Lindsay and, later, on the rise of Ed Koch, Mario Cuomo, and Rudy Giuliani, teasing out the tensions between public virtue and political theater. When Rupert Murdoch acquired the New York Post, Kempton departed, joining Newsday in 1977. There he worked alongside other prominent New York voices, including Jimmy Breslin, and carved out a column that wandered widely but always returned to the consequences of power for the powerless.

Style and Method
Kempton's style was unmistakable: urbane, allusive, and gently ironic. He was a moralist without being censorious, a skeptic who refused cynicism. His columns could place a day's news in the long frame of history and then, with a turn of phrase, return to a sidewalk conversation overheard while pedaling between courthouses and campaign headquarters. He was fascinated by the choreography of institutions and the frailty of the individuals who served them. He reported on civil rights activism with sympathetic rigor, writing about figures shaped by the era's crucibles, including Martin Luther King Jr., while refusing to flatten them into symbols. For Kempton, the city was a living archive of promises kept and broken, and the columnist's duty was to recollect fairly.

Relationships and Influence
Kempton's reach extended beyond the readership of any single paper. William F. Buckley Jr., a conservative adversary in print, became a friendly antagonist and admirer, often citing Kempton's prose as a model of intellectual hospitality across ideological lines. Within New York's press corps, his presence helped define a generation of metropolitan reporting: he shared newsrooms with writers like Breslin and traded views with contemporaries such as Pete Hamill, even as their sensibilities diverged. Public figures felt the sting and solace of his attention. Politicians he covered understood that he could praise a courageous vote and, with equal elegance, remind readers of the compromises that accompanied it.

Recognition
Kempton received the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 1985 for his Newsday columns, a recognition that formalized what journalists and readers already knew: he had made the daily newspaper a vessel for literature of public life. Prizes mattered less to him than the discipline of returning to the page, but the award affirmed the careful craftsmanship and moral steadiness that animated his work. Over the decades he also became a touchstone for journalism students and young reporters who studied his columns to see how observation, structure, and tone could coexist without sacrificing clarity.

Later Years and Legacy
Kempton wrote into the 1990s with undimmed curiosity, keeping close watch on the courts, unions, neighborhoods, and political clubs that were his natural beats. He died in 1997, still associated in the public mind with his bicycle, his bow on the page to history, and his stubborn fidelity to fairness. In an age when commentary often splits into applause and denunciation, he practiced a discriminating sympathy, attentive to the tangled motives of radicals and bosses, prosecutors and defendants, liberals and conservatives. His portraits of Chambers and Hiss, his careful chronicling of the Panther 21, and his steady judgment of New York's mayors and would-be reformers remain durable because they refuse to simplify.

Colleagues and rivals have cited Kempton as a standard for what a metropolitan columnist can be: a witness who listens, a stylist whose wit clarifies rather than distracts, and an ethicist in the oldest sense, testing public actions against private conscience. The city he mapped has changed, as have its newspapers, but the example endures. Readers can still hear, in the cadence of his sentences, a reporter riding toward the next courthouse, pausing to greet a doorman or a campaign worker, and then heading on, resolved that every person he encountered might illuminate the matter at hand.

Our collection contains 9 quotes who is written by Murray, under the main topics: Witty One-Liners - Ethics & Morality - Wisdom - Justice - Meaning of Life.