Farewell Jimmy Breslin

1930-2017

Journalist / Author

The American journalist Jimmy Breslin was known most of all for his streetwise, sympathetic newspaper columns that captured the lives of New York's working class residents.

One key to Breslin's longevity (he began writing around 1950 and was still quite active in the early 2010s), however, was that daily newspaper commentary was only one part of a continuum of talents that extended to fiction writing, biography, and memoir on one hand and direct political activism on the other. Breslin never became a comfortable institution of journalism, always seeking out new ways of expressing his ideas. Politically, Breslin was a progressive in a long New York tradition, motivated by a desire to illuminate the hopes and trials of the working-class people who have come to the city throughout its history and built it into what it is today. (Source: Encyclopedia of World Biography, July 12, 2013).


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