Jimmy Breslin, 88; longtime NYC columnist
Jimmy Breslin, long the gruff and rumpled king of streetwise New York newspaper columnists, a Pulitzer Prize winner whose muscular, unadorned prose pummeled the venal, deflated the pompous and gave voice to ordinary city-dwellers for decades, died March 19 at his home in Manhattan. He was 88.
The cause was complications from pneumonia, stepdaughter Emily Eldridge.
For an "unlettered bum," as Breslin called himself, he left an estimable legacy of published work, including 16 books, seven of them novels, plus two anthologies of his columns.
What set him apart as a writer was the inimitable style of his journalism across the last great decades of ink-on-paper news, in the 1960s for the old New York Herald Tribune and later for the Daily News and the city pages of Long Island-based Newsday, where his final regular column appeared in 2004.
In that pre-web era, before desk-bound bloggers saturated the opinion market, Breslin was a familiar archetype — the quintessential sidewalk-pounding big-city columnist, loved and loathed all over town, a champion of the put-upon and a thorn to the mighty and the swell.
He and other marquee metropolitan columnists back then were household names in their cities, their faces splashed in ads on the sides of buses and newspaper delivery trucks.
"Built like a Tammany ward heeler of a century ago, all belly and lopsided grin," as People magazine put it in 1982, Breslin was a hyperliterate everyman, a barstool bard full of bluster and mirth.