About the Book
A definitive collection of writings by the legendary Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Murray Kempton (1917-1997) with a foreword by Darryl Pinckney, gathering dozens of columns, essays, and critiques from publications including The New York Post, The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, and Newsday.
With many uncollected and long out-of-print writings, this is the first volume of Kempton's work to appear in 30 years, a book that resdiscovers the legendary figure of journalism that David Remnick called "the greatest newspaperman in town."
"The man is a marvel. It's like listening to Louis Armstrong, or Roy Eldridge- you don't know where the hell he is going, but somehow he gets there and it knocks your socks off." -Frank Sinatra
A definitive collection of writings by the legendary Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Murray Kempton (1917-1997) with a foreword by Darryl Pinckney, gathering dozens of columns, essays, and critiques from publications including The New York Post, The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, and Newsday.
With many uncollected and long out-of-print writings, this is the first volume of Kempton's work to appear in 30 years, a book that resdiscovers the legendary figure of journalism that David Remnick called "the greatest newspaperman in town."
"The man is a marvel. It's like listening to Louis Armstrong, or Roy Eldridge- you don't know where the hell he is going, but somehow he gets there and it knocks your socks off." -Frank Sinatra
A courtly man of Southern roots, Murray Kempton worked as a labor reporter for the New York Post, won a Pulitzer Prize while at Newsday, and was arrested at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago along the way. He wore three piece suits and polished oxfords and was known for riding his bicycle around New York City while listening to his CD Walkman and smoking a pipe with wild red hair that later turned white. He developed a taste for baroque prose and became, in the words of Robert Silvers, his editor at The New York Review of Books, ''unmatched in his moral insight into the hypocrisies of politics and their consequences for the poor and powerless.''
He went to court proceedings and traffic accidents and funerals and to speeches by people who either were or wanted to be rich and famous. He wrote about everything and anybody-Tonya Harding and Warren Harding, Fidel Castro and Mussolini, Harry Truman and Sal Maglie, St. Francis of Assisi and James Joyce and J. Edgar Hoover.
From dispatches from a hardscrabble coal town in Western Maryland, a bus carrying Freedom Riders through Mississippi, an Iowa cornfield with Nikita Krushchev, an encampment of guerrillas in El Salvador, and Moscow at the end of the Soviet Union (these last two assignments filed by a reporter in his 70s), Kempton's concerns and interests were extraordinarily broad. He wrote about subjects from H.L. Mencken to Tupac Shakur; organized labor and McCarthyism; the Civil Rights and Black Power movements; presidential hopefuls and Mafiosi; frauds and failures of all stripes; the "splendors and miseries" of life in New York City.
Table of Contents:
Foreword, by Darryl Pinckney
Introduction, by Andrew Holter
I’ll Still Take Roosevelt, 10/6/36
“Last Boat for Jerusalem,” 1941 50
All for Mr. Davis: The Story of Sharecropper Odell Waller (with Pauli Murray), 1941
The Wobblies and Tom Clark, 8/2/49
Christmas in Shallmar, Md., 12/22/49
Women Pickets Only ‘Floozies’ to Tenn. Troops, 6/7/50
Huntsman, What Quarry?, 4/29/53
A Night Thought, 6/11/53
Bad Day at the Track, 3/11/54
The Real Davy, 6/21/55
Intruder in the Dust, 11/1/55
The Way It’s Got to Be, 2/9/56
All the Saints, 3/7/56 111
Buckley’s National Bore, July 1956
Daughter of the Furies, 1/29/57
The Inheritance, New York Post, 6/19/57
Loyalty, 8/14/57
The Wrong Man, 8/15/57
The Big Cheese, 4/2/58 134
Ten Days That Shook, 9/24/59
Let Me Off Uptown, 9/21/60
A Seat on the Bus, 3/25/61
The Saddest Story, 6/5/62
“I would like to talk to you tonight quite personally...,” address at rally against the McCarran Act, Manhattan Center, New York, 7/7/62
Visiting Hours, 8/6/62
Back at the Polo Grounds, August 1962
The Clarity of A. Philip Randolph, 7/6/63
The March on Washington, 9/4/63
Romans (with James Ridgeway), 12/7/63
The Champ and the Chump, March 7, 1964
The Meritocracy of Labor, 2/2/65
Robert George Thompson: American, 1/26/66
Four Days in Mississippi, 7/1/66
K. Marx: Reporter, 6/15/67
The Underestimation of Dwight D. Eisenhower, September, 1967
Thoughts on Columbia, 4/30/68
Illusion to Reality, from Law & Disorder: The Chicago Convention and Its Aftermath (Chicago: D. Myrus, 1968)
A Victory for Proper Manners, 3/7/70
The Panthers on Trial, 5/7/70
“One underappreciated advantage to being a pauper...,” 9/9/71
My Last Mugging, December 1971
“Our war with North Vietnam...,” 1/30/73
“The streakers seem to have disappeared...,” 3/21/74
Witnesses, 6/10/76
Yes, the Ferry is Far From Perfect, 5/18/78
We Owe the Mob a Lot, 3/25/78
The Making of the Pope, 9/11/78
A Name for a Crime, 10/15/78 287
Offsides for False Modesty, 11/2/78
The Scribblers’ Choice, 9/18/80
Saving a Whale, 6/11/81
The Sad Secrets of an Assassin’s Mind, 10/15/81
Captain Jolly Hasn’t Noticed We’re Adrift, 1/6/83
Mussolini in Concert, 4/14/83
The Ambivalence of J. Robert Oppenheimer, 12/1/83
Mrs. Velasquez and the Politicians, 2/2/84
“If I Leave You, Baby, Count the Days I’m Gone,” 4/29/84
Example of Police Restraint Ends in Coma–and Death, 6/26/84
Pride and Prejudice, 12/5/84
Splendors and Miseries on Gramercy Park, January 1985
Parade’s End, 6/13/85
The Landlord State, 9/5/85
Report from Nicaragua, 6/27/86
If RICO Wins, We Lose, 3/8/87
Verdict on a City, 6/17/87
Bessie Smith: Poet, 4/5/87
Strange Landscape at Passion’s Height, Newsday, 11/15/87
Turning 70, Just by Chance, 12/17/87
Hostage to History, 6/19/88
The Beggar of Gracie Mansion, 8/11/88
Undertaking Roy Cohn, Autumn 1988 396
Bike Theft as a Point of Departure, 10/2/88
On Clemency for Jean Harris, 10/13/88
The Proof That Trump is a Self-Made Man, 6/4/89
My File is Haunted by Hoover, 5/14/89
Death, Life in Painting, Exhibition, 11/17/89
In the Oddly Delightful Company of Guerrillas, 12/3/89
Unsentimental Education, 9/13/91
Oh, for Brawls of Yesteryear, 4/12/92
Let Me Be Wrong About Clinton, 5/27/93
A Raisin in the Sun, 3/24/94
Brave Instincts, Affirming Dignity, 12/1/94
The Reporter’s One Commanding Duty, address upon receiving the Elijah Parish Lovejoy Award, Colby College, 11/9/95
A Little Boy with Ol’ Blue Eyes, 12/15/96
Unjust Advances Behind Bars, 1/5/97
Once Ain’t for Always, 6/12/97
“Trespassing,” c. 1995
“My Funeral,” 5/8/97
Sources
Acknowledgments
About the Author :
MURRAY KEMPTON was born in 1917 and raised in the Mount Vernon neighborhood of Baltimore. He spent much of his career as a columnist for The New York Post and, later, New York Newsday. He wrote regularly for The New York Review of Books and contributed journalism, essays, and criticism to publications including The Progressive, Esquire, Rolling Stone, and The New Republic, where he worked briefly as an editor. He wrote two books- Part of Our Time- Some Ruins and Monuments of the Thirties (1955) and The Briar Patch- The People of New York vs. Lumumba Shakur, et al. (1973), which won a National Book Award. His other distinctions include two George Polk awards; the inaugural Sidney Hillman Prize; a Grammy for his contribution to the liner notes of a Frank Sinatra boxed set; and the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 1985. He died in New York City in 1997.
ANDREW HOLTER (b. 1990) is a historian and writer based in Chicago, formerly of Frederick, Maryland, and Baltimore. His work has appeared in The Times Literary Supplement, Rolling Stone, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Brooklyn Rail, Lapham's Quarterly, and other publications. As an independent historical researcher, he has contributed to books, radio programs, and museum exhibitions, and served as the primary archival consultant for Theo Anthony's 2016 documentary Rat Film, which the New Yorker called one of "62 Films That Shaped the Art of Documentary Filmmaking."
Review :
"All we journalists were in awe of Murray, not simply because he knew more than we did, but because he could do more with what he knew. How I miss him."—Garry Wills, author of Lincoln at Gettysburg
"This is a vital collection for all who remain committed to journalism as an art form. Just as splendidly as it did decades ago, Kempton's writing reminds us of all this medium can and must continue to do." —Osita Nwanevu, contributing editor at The New Republic and columnist at The Guardian
"When and if the dust finally settles on the American Century, Murray Kempton will prove to have been one of its greatest writers: almost miraculously immersed in every region, profession, political movement, and social class, he leaves behind a body of work whose range (seven decades!) and moral ambition seem nothing short of majestic. This new anthology rescues him from a pile of clippings and lets his voice ring out even more clearly than it did during his life."—Benjamin Moser, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Sontag: Her Life and Work
"Murray Kempton wrote stately, measured prose in the tradition of Gibbon and Macauley, and within hours of publication it was used to wrap fish. He was also one of the great moral witnesses of his time, there on the sidewalk for 60-odd years, bringing his gimlet eye and sense of justice and solidarity—formed by his Episcopalian-bishop forebears and the IWW—to bear through the darkest and most hopeful times of the late twentieth century. I'm very happy there is at last a representative selection of his work, with a moving introductory portrait by Darryl Pinckney to put flesh on the bones."—Lucy Sante, author of I Heard Her Call My Name
"Throughout his career, the Pulitzer Prize–winning columnist and reporter Kempton (1917-1997) stood out among journalists. His approach was critical, and he was, writes editor Holter, 'for the downtrodden, instinctively.' Of the guerrillas in 1980s El Salvador, Kempton wrote, 'There aren’t all that many human creatures more attractive than some revolutionaries can be, at least until they win.' As regards police violence against civil rights activists: 'It is, of course, law and order when everyone who hits anyone else is wearing a uniform.' What mattered to him lay deeper. The Civil Rights March on Washington represented 'an acceptance of the revolutionaries into the American establishment' that embodied the white hope 'that the Negro revolt will stop where it is.' Holter, an independent historical researcher, has gathered nearly 90 articles and editorials 'from every period in Kempton’s career.' Many are outstanding. The first is Kempton’s 1936 defense of Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the last outlines his instructions for his funeral. Kempton’s subjects range from labor unions and his FBI file to notables such as A. Philip Randolph, Dwight Eisenhower, and J. Robert Oppenheimer; cultural figures such as the blues singer Bessie Smith; and the less famous such as Odell Waller, a 1940s black sharecropper who shot his white landlord during a dispute. A voice for the times, he wrote with a grace seldom encountered today. Of the conservative William F. Buckley, he said: 'I did not want him to fail, except in the superficial sense of dying an old man without ever seeing the kind of America he thinks he wants.' Describing the future president, in 1989, he concluded: 'We are assured that God does not make trash, which thought disposes of the impression that Donald Trump is not altogether a self-made man.'
"Reading Kempton reminds us that, no matter the chaos, justice and human dignity are within our reach."—Kirkus, Starred Review
"That variety of subjects, observations, and opinions is what makes this a charming collection of Kempton’s always readable prose. His curiosity and his constant attention to the variety of American life make Kempton’s reporting, even sometimes eight decades old, as much an accurate depiction of an era fast fading from view as an introduction to Kempton’s inviting and distinct point of view. If people today wonder what’s wrong with American journalism, it could very well be that it lacks reporters, like Kempton, who are not offended by but often appreciate America’s vices and follies." —D.G. Hart, Law & Liberty
