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James Murray Kempton (December 16, 1917 – May 5, 1997) was an Americanjournalist andsocial and political commentator. He won aNational Book Award in 1974(category, "Contemporary Affairs") forThe Briar Patch: The People of the State of New York versus Lumumba Shakur, et al.[1] Reprinted, 1997, with new subtitleThe Trial of thePanther 21. He won aPulitzer Prize (category, "Commentary") in 1985 "for witty and insightful reflection on public issues in 1984 and throughout a distinguished career."
Murray Kempton was born on December 16, 1917, inBaltimore, Maryland, the only child of Sally Ambler and James Branson Kempton, a stock broker, who died when Murray was three years of age.[2] Kempton worked as a copyboy forH. L. Mencken at theBaltimore Evening Sun. He enteredJohns Hopkins in 1935, where he was editor-in-chief of theJohns Hopkins News-Letter.
After his graduation in 1939, he worked for a short time as a labor organizer, then joined the staff of theNew York Post, earning a reputation for a quietly elegant prose style that featured long but rhythmic sentences, a flair for irony, and gentle, almost scholarly sarcasm.He served in theU.S. Army Air Forces duringWorld War II and was stationed in New Guinea and the Philippines. He rejoinedNew York Post in 1949 as labor editor and later as a columnist. He won a Hillman Prize in 1950 for his contributions to journalism.[3] He also wrote for the NYC-basedWorld-Telegram and Sun and a short-lived successor, theWorld Journal Tribune, a merger between theTelegram, theNew York Herald-Tribune, and theNew York Journal American. His 1955 bookPart of Our Time: Some Ruins and Monuments of the Thirties was a farewell to his youthfulCommunism. During 1958 and '59 he spent a year in Rome on a scholarship of theU.S.-Italy Fulbright Commission.
During the 1960s he editedThe New Republic. He returned to theNew York Post yet again in 1977 after it was bought byRupert Murdoch. In 1981, he became a columnist forNewsday, theLong Island-based daily. Additionally, Kempton was also a regular contributor toThe New York Review of Books,Esquire magazine, CBS'sSpectrum radio opinion series, andNational Review, the conservative magazine with whose editor,William F. Buckley, Jr., Kempton had enjoyed a longtime friendship that grew from their ideological rivalry.
Known as a modest, courtly man who was generous with fellow journalists and friends, Kempton had his eccentricities.
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 Booknotes interview with Kempton onRebellions, Perversities, and Main Events, July 3, 1994,C-SPAN |
He never learned to drive and could often be spotted riding a bicycle in New York City while wearing a three-piece suit. He was shown that way in television spots that promoted the New York edition ofNewsday in which Kempton brought his bicycle to a stop at an intersection and deadpanned, "I guess I've been around so long that people think theyhave to like me." His bicycling was also depicted in a cartoon showing him standing next to his three-speed bicycle that accompanied first a 1993 profile inThe New Yorker and later the jacket of what proved his final book, an anthology calledRebellions, Perversities, and Main Events. Kempton dedicated the book to Buckley, whom he once admitted had nagged him for years to assemble the collection: "For William F. Buckley, Jr., genius at friendships that surpass all understanding."
Kempton received one of the firstHillman Prizes in 1950 for his articles on labor in the South. Kempton won thePulitzer Prize for distinguished commentary in 1985 atNewsday. Ten years later, he received theElijah Parish Lovejoy Award as well as an honoraryDoctor of Laws degree fromColby College. He was so known for hisrococo style that in his essay collectionHooking Up (2000),Tom Wolfe wrote, "Kempton used so many elegant British double and triple negatives, half the time you couldn't figure out what he was saying."
Kempton wrote approximately 10,000 entries for his columns over the course of his career.[4] He died on May 5, 1997, at Kateri Nursing Home in Manhattan at the age of 79 while suffering frompancreatic cancer.[2]
He was the father ofSally Kempton.[5]
Kempton's writing was often described as "baroque".[4] His sentences were often long and composed ofdependent clauses, and he used an elevated vocabulary. Most of the time he covered issues relevant to New York. Explaining his focus on the city, he said, "I walk wide of the cosmic and settle most happily for the local."[6] JournalistDavid Halberstam credited Kempton with pioneering the genre ofNew Journalism through his "short story"-like installments in his columns.[7]
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