Jimmy Breslin

Jack Newfield and Wayne Barrett book “City for Sale”: “an intellectual disguised as a barroom primitive” Jimmy Breslin, the New York City newspaper columnist and best-selling author who leveled the powerful and elevated the powerless for more than 50 years with brick-hard words and a jagged-glass wit, died in March 2017 at his home in Manhattan. He was 88. His death was confirmed by his wife, Ronnie Eldridge, a prominent Democratic politician in Manhattan. He often explained that he merely applied a sportswriter’s visual sensibility to the news columns. Mr. Breslin developed the persona of the hard-drinking, dark-humored Everyman from Queens. Mr. Breslin was unmatched in his attention to the poor and disenfranchised. After getting a job as a sportswriter for The New York Journal-American, Mr. Breslin wrote a freshly funny book about the first season of the hapless Mets, “Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game?” Mr. Breslin would leave daily newspapers in search of better pay. In 1969, he resigned from The New York Post after writing his first novel, “The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight,” He became one of the first staff writers at New York magazine. In 1968, he was nearby when Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles. In 1969, he ran for City Council president on a wacky, wildly unsuccessful ticket that included Norman Mailer for mayor. And in 1977, most famously, Mr. Breslin received a chilling letter from the serial killer known as Son of Sam. He wrote biographies of Damon Runyon and Branch Rickey. In 2004, Mr. Breslin resigned from his three-columns-a-week job at Newsday to pursue other writing projects. In 1981, Mr. Breslin’s first wife, Rosemary, died of cancer; she was 50. In 2004, his elder daughter, Rosemary, a writer, died of a rare blood disease; she was 47. In 2009, his other daughter, Kelly, died after collapsing in a Manhattan restaurant; she was 44. In 1982, he married Ms. Eldridge in a Catholic-Jewish union that, with his six children and her three, provided rich column material. In addition to his wife, Ms. Eldridge, a former city councilwoman from Manhattan, Mr. Breslin is survived by his four sons, Kevin, James, Patrick and Christopher; a stepson, Daniel Eldridge; two stepdaughters, Emily and Lucy Eldridge; a sister, Deirdre Breslin; and 12 grandchildren.