Jim Dwyer, Pulitzerwinning chronicler of NYC life, dies at 63

Jim Dwyer, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, columnist and author who made New York City his beat, writing about terrorist attacks, police corruption and the everyday frustrations and comic encounters of the city’s workers, commuters and dreamers, died Oct. 8 at a New York hospital.

He was 63.

The cause was complications from lung cancer, said his daughter Catherine Dwyer.

Dwyer, a native New Yorker and the son of Irish immigrants, followed in a long tradition of newsprint bards who walked the city’s streets, chatted with strangers and reveled in the city’s grit and glamour. While working successively at New York Newsday, the Daily News and the New York Times, he also wrote six books, on subjects as varied as the city’s subway system, terrorist attacks and a group of college students creating an internet company - and was featured as a character in a Broadway play by Nora Ephron.

In 1995, when Dwyer won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary at New York Newsday, a now- defunct edition of the Long Islandbased Newsday, his editor, Donald Forst, called him “quintessential New York. He is smart and wise, tough and compassionate. And he has a touch of the poet in him which shows in his writing.”

Dwyer was a beat reporter before finding wider acclaim in the late 1980s with a column in Newsday about New York’s subway system.

After almost four years, Dwyer climbed out of the subways to become a city columnist, writing three times a week about the ever- changing daily parade of New York City.