Back Essential Writings

Jimmy Breslin: Essential Writings

Columns & Other Journalism 1960–2004 | How the Good Guys Finally Won | The Short Sweet Dream of Eduardo Gutiérrez More

Edited by Dan Barry

“The magnificent journalism Breslin produced in his long career amounts to a pocket history of our times—high and low—told with energetic reporting and an unmistakable verve.”—Wall Street Journal

Overview
Table of Contents

Overview

Story of the Week “It’s an Honor,” Jimmy Breslin
October 17, 2024

Interviews “Away from the Crowd”: Dan Barry on the Iconoclastic Genius of Jimmy Breslin
April 18, 2024

Video Deadline Artist: The Genius of Jimmy Breslin, with Dan Barry, Mike Barnicle, and Mike Lupica
March 7, 2024

Reporters from across America and around the globe converged on Washington in November 1963 to cover the state funeral of John F. Kennedy. One, a thirty-five-year-old columnist from New York, turned his attention not on the stricken first family or the assembled world leaders but on Clifton Pollard, the man who dug the president’s grave at Arlington National Cemetery. The result is an indelible portrait of a nation’s grief as expressed in the otherwise anonymous performance of a single, solemn task.

This was Jimmy Breslin’s special gift, to uncover the hidden human dimensions in every story. Brash, cantankerous, and often funny, Breslin was an indefatigable master of deadline writing. His columns were events, attracting millions of readers, winning the admiration of other journalists, and bringing Breslin, in 1986, the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary. As quintessentially New York as the memorable urban characters he portrayed, Breslin emerged as a major national voice, one whose understanding of American life—its political scandals, its Mafia subculture, its indifference to immigrants and other vulnerable people—continues to resonate.

The seventy-three columns and longform magazine articles selected for this volume by editor Dan Barry, more than half collected for the first time, reveal Breslin at his very best. Among the highlights: coverage of the assassination of Malcolm X; dispatches from the South at the height of the Civil Rights Movement and from the war in Vietnam; accounts of his involvement with the “Son of Sam” case as the serial killer terrorized New York City in 1977; the story about John Lennon’s murder in 1980; award-winning writing about police brutality and about the AIDS crisis in the 1980s; and Breslin’s appalled glimpse in 1990 of Donald Trump conning the press corps into covering his every move. Also included are moving personal reflections, such as Breslin’s elegy for his first wife and his tribute to fellow scribe Murray Kempton.

Breslin’s newspaper journalism is joined here by two essential book-length works. How the Good Guys Finally Won: Notes from an Impeachment Summer (1975) offers a vivid narrative of the efforts of House Majority Leader Tip O’Neill, special counsel John Doar, and their associates to bring down President Richard Nixon in the wake of the Watergate break-in and cover-up. The Short Sweet Dream of Eduardo Gutiérrez (2002), the story of an undocumented immigrant laborer killed at a construction site in Brooklyn, exposes a web of malfeasance among developers, contractors, and city officials that enabled the accident to happen.

Dan Barry, editor, is a reporter and columnist for The New York Times. His awards include the Best American Newspaper Narrative Award in 2015; the Meyer “Mike” Berger Award from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism in 2005; and the American Society of Newspaper Editors Award for deadline reporting in 2003. He is the author of several books, including This Land: America, Lost and Found (2018), a collection of his “This Land” columns first published in the Times.

This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.

This volume is available for adoption in the Guardian of American Letters Fund.
Table of Contents

Columns and Other Journalism 1960–1974
Racing’s Angriest Young Man
Worst Baseball Team Ever
The Old Indian’s Last Stand
Whitey Revisited
The Wake for a Newspaper
The Last Gallo Living at 51 President Street
The Talent Hunt
A Death in Emergency Room One
It’s an Honor
Holiday in Automa
Feat of Clay: TKO in 7th
Fear and Hate—Sputtering Fuse
The Last Great Statue
Malcolm X Slain by Gunmen as 400 in Ballroom Watch
On Highway 80
Alabama Schoolhouse
The Retreat
The Day I Company Got Killed
Four Funerals
Warm Air, Light Skin
Stork Club Closes an Era
The One Woman in the Operating Room
Easter Rising
A Struck Paper, Famous and Needed, Goes Down
Hero of ’54 World Series Watches ’66 Epic from Prison Bench
Will All Those Kids Vote for Bobby?
Home Folks “Treat” a Hero Too Well
“Friendly Napalm” Changes Return Address on a Soldier’s Letter
Namath All Night Long
The Baseball Encyclopedia
The Greatest Article I Read in My Whole Life
The Coach Who Couldn’t Shoot Straight
The Best Short Stories of Ring Lardner

How the Good Guys Finally Won: Notes from an Impeachment Summer

Columns 1976–2004
Two Who Will Watch and One Who Won’t
Dies the Victim, Dies the City
On the Hunt for Son of Sam
To the .44-Caliber Killer on His 1st Deathday
Door Opens, It’s Always Stacy
How I Shot Down the Concorde All by Myself
Bella Was Old Hat
Un Occhio’s Portrait with a Singer
They Always Shoot the Young
Thousands of People Are Dying to Live in New York
For the Love of a Thief
“Are You John Lennon?”
Society Carey
He Bites the Helping Hand
She Said Good-bye with Charm
“Por Unas Horas”
Mix Me a Family
Light, Then Shadow of a Gunman
Goetz Should Take Mayoralty Shot
They Call It Their Bumpurs Case
Torture Charge Could Prod Cops
Putting the Cattle Prod to Justice
In This Scandal, the Buck Stops
Ward Left His Job in San Francisco
His Days Turn to Daze on 8th St.
Sick with AIDS and Without Real Aid
Shooting Script
Life in a Cage
Trump: The Master of the Steal
A Master Goes into the Skull
Disaster Below Jolts the City’s Spinal Cord
Mick’s Docs Sow Disease of Despair
A Mother’s Son Lost and Found
His Words Will Never Disappear
The Threat Lies Within
A Smile Gone, but Where?
Days of Wine and Rosaries
Church Isn’t What It Should Be
A Daughter’s Last Breaths

The Short Sweet Dream of Eduardo Gutierrez

32.00 List Price: $40.00 (Save: 20%) Free shipping on orders $50 and over

Or buy from our partners

Phone orders: 1-800-964-5778 Request product #203937

ISBN: 978-1-59853-768-0 734 pages

LOA books are distributed worldwide by Penguin Random House

N° 377 Library of America Series

Subscribers can purchase the slipcased edition by signing in to their accounts.

Related Books

A. J. Liebling: The Sweet Science and Other Writings LOA N°191

Reporting Civil Rights (boxed set)

Norman Mailer: Collected Essays of the 1960s LOA N°306

Don DeLillo: Three Novels of the 1980s LOA N°363

The Great American Sports Page

Library of America

CURATOR

A champion of America’s great writers and timeless works, Library of America guides readers in finding and exploring the exceptional writing that reflects the nation’s history and culture.

Learn More

PUBLISHER

From poetry, novels, and memoirs to journalism, crime writing, and science fiction, the more than 300 volumes published by Library of America are widely recognized as America’s literary canon.

Browse our books Subscribe

NON-PROFIT

With contributions from donors, Library of America preserves and celebrates a vital part of our cultural heritage for generations to come.

Support our mission

Jimmy Breslin: Essential Writings

Related Books

Get 10% off your first Library of America purchase.