Colleagues Celebrate Jimmy Breslin's 60 Years in Journalism

A Who's Who of New York journalists and writers convened by Pete Hamill will discuss the career of Pulitzer Prize winning newspaper columnist, non-fiction author and novelist Jimmy Breslin at New York University on Monday.

The event will take place at 7 p.m. at the Kimmel Center for University Life, 60 Washington Sq. S., fourth floor in Manhattan, a press release says. It is co-sponsored by Glucksman Ireland House — the Center for Irish and Irish-American Studies at New York University — and the NYU Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute.

Among the participants: Dan Barry, columnist, The New York Times; Gail Collins, columnist, The Times; Jim Dwyer, columnist, The Times; Mary Ann Giordano, editor, The Times; Carl Hiassen, novelist, columnist, The Miami Herald; Mike Lupica, novelist, columnist, N.Y. Daily News; Stephen G. Murphy, defense attorney; Mike O’Neill, former editor, Daily News; Sam Roberts, urban affairs correspondent, The Times and former city editor, Daily News.

A matchless New York voice, the city’s “steadiest and most accurate chronicler” (Tom Robbins, The Village Voice, March 19, 2002), Breslin was born in Queens, N.Y., in 1929. He started as a copy boy at 15 at the Long Island Press and worked there as a reporter covering fires, crime and sports. In the late 1950s he became a sports columnist at the New York Journal-American and in 1963 he published his first book, Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game? The Improbable Saga of the New York Mets’ First Year. Breslin wrote his first city-side column for the New York Herald-Tribune from 1963 to 1966. He was at The Daily News from 1976 to 1988 and received the Pulitzer Prize for Distinguished Commentary at the paper in 1986. He then joined Newsday and stayed from 1988 until his retirement as a columnist in 2004. Pioneering in style and in focus, his columns were peopled with the prominent, the shady, and those struggling with poverty and crime. He also reported from Northern Ireland, Vietnam, and other places well beyond New York. His first novel, The Gang that Couldn’t Shoot Straight, was published in 1970 and was made into a successful film. His most recent book The Good Rat: A True Story, was published in 2008. In all, he has published seven novels and 10 works of non-fiction.