Jimmy Breslin obit

Jimmy Breslin, Pulitzer Prize-Winning New York Columnist, Dies at 88

He was not on the list.

Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist-author Jimmy Breslin, the surly, hard-nosed New Yorker who wrote with the hum and verve of the urban streets from which he came, died on Sunday. He was 88.

Breslin died in his Manhattan home due to complications of pneumonia, his personal physician told the New York Daily News.

With his brash take on Big Apple pols, cops, crooks, and working men and women, Breslin was a fixture in New York journalism for more than 50 years. He spent the bulk of his career with the New York Daily News, but his byline also graced Newsday, the New York Herald Tribune, and the New York Journal American. Breslin made his name during a bygone era of journalism, a time when the city’s tabloids played an outsized role in driving the day’s agenda and were essential reading for power brokers and the powerless alike. Their primacy was supplanted by the rise of digital platforms and the collapse of print advertising, but even as their influence waned, Breslin kept writing.

Breslin maintained a rough-hewn edge, his columns crackled with the language of the barroom, an association that resulted in a brief stint making pitches for Piels Beer on television.