Jimmy Breslin - Collected Nonfiction: How the Good Guys Finally Won, The World According to Breslin, and The World of Jimmy Breslin

Collected Nonfiction

How the Good Guys Finally Won, The World According to Breslin, and The World of Jimmy Breslin

Jimmy Breslin

CONTENTS

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

How the Good Guys Finally Won Copyright 1975 by Jimmy Breslin

The World According to Breslin Copyright 1984 by Ronridge Publications, Inc., Michael J. ONeill, and William Bink

The World of Jimmy Breslin Copyright 1963, 1964, 1965, 1966, 1967 by Jimmy Breslin

Cover design by Mimi Bark

ISBN: 978-1-5040-5621-2

This edition published in 2018 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

180 Maiden Lane

New York, NY 10038

www.openroadmedia.com

JIMMY BRESLIN

FROM OPEN ROAD MEDIA

Jimmy Breslin (19282017) was a Pulitzer Prizewinning journalist and one of the most prominent columnists in the United States. Known for his straightforward reporting style that relates major news to the common man, Breslin published more than a dozen books of fiction and nonfiction, in addition to writing columns for newspapers such as the New York Daily News and Newsday.

Born in Queens, New York, Breslin began his long newsroom career in the 1940s, lying about his age to get a job as a copyboy at the Long Island Press. He got his first column in 1963, at the New York Herald Tribune, where he won national attention by covering John F. Kennedys assassination from the emergency room in the Dallas Hospital and, later, from the point of view of the Presidents gravedigger at Arlington Cemetery. He also provided significant coverage of the civil rights turmoil raging in the South, and was an early opponent of the Vietnam War.

In 1969, Breslin ran for city council president on Norman Mailers mayoral ticket. The two campaigned on a platform arguing for statehood for New York City and for banning private cars in Manhattan, among other issues. Breslin placed fifth in the primary election, garnering eleven percent of the vote. He later quipped that he was mortified to have taken part in a process that required bars to be closed, referring to a law in place at the time that prohibited the sale of liquor on election days.

In the early 1970s, Breslin retired from newspaper journalism to write books, beginning with The Gang Who Couldnt Shoot Straight (1970), a national bestseller that was adapted into a 1971 film starring Robert De Niro and Jerry Orbach. By this time Breslin had also published Sunny Jim (1962), about legendary racehorse trainer Jim Fitzsimmons, and Cant Anybody Here Play This Game? (1963), about the disastrous first season of the New York Mets baseball team. He also wrote How the Good Guys Finally Won (1976), about the Watergate Scandal and Nixons subsequent impeachment, a prevalent topic for him in the early 1970s.

Breslin returned to column-writing later in the decade, taking jobs first at the New York Daily News, then at Newsday. As always, he covered the city by focusing on ordinary people as well as larger-than-life personalities. His intimate knowledge of cops, Mafia dons, and petty thieves provided fodder for his columns. In the late 1970s, his profile was so high that Son of Sam killer David Berkowitz sent him letters, to boast about and publicize his crimes.

Known for being one of the best-informed journalists in the city, Breslins years of insightful reporting won him a Pulitzer Prize in 1986, awarded for columns which consistently champion ordinary citizens. Among the work cited when he received the Pulitzer were his early columns on the victims of AIDS and his expos on the stun-gun torture of a suspected drug dealer by police in Queens. Although he stopped writing his weekly column for Newsday in 2004, Breslin continued writing books, producing nearly two dozen throughout his life. These include collections of his best columns titled The World of Jimmy Breslin (1969) and The World According to Jimmy Breslin (1988). He passed away in 2017 at the age of eighty-eight.

Breslin as a young man with his sister Diedre.

Breslin writing at home in Forest Hills, Queens.