Going Around
Selected Writings of Murray Kempton
Edited by Andrew Holter
Across seven decades as a working reporter and over 10,000 columns filed, journalist Murray Kempton’s approach, from the ‘50s to his death in 1997, was always the same: stick up for the people and do so with uncommon style and grace. The winner of a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award, he reported for the New York Post, the New Republic, Newsday, and the New York Review of Books – among other publications – and was credited, by David Halberstam, for pioneering the genre of New Journalism.
Kempton elevated the art of reporting as both a stylist and a moralist, matching his attentiveness to wit and irony with what one critic called “a compassion that is sometimes unruly.” The scion of an aristocratic Southern family who rejected his staid upbringing to become a radical socialist, he was an eloquent defender of American communists during the McCarthy era and one of the first white reporters to make the Civil Rights Movement into a beat. And he was an indelible New York character, traveling across Manhattan by bike, even as an old man, a Walkman around his neck.
Going Around: Selected Writings of Murray Kempton is the first collection of Kempton’s writing to appear in over a quarter-century. In collecting these pieces, historian Andrew Holter, with the collaboration of Kempton’s estate and the family of Barbara Epstein, his longtime companion, blows the dust off an illustrious body of work. The book puts one of the most revered, if too long unsung, American nonfiction writers of the 20th century into conversation with controversies of the 21st that he anticipated. These include the ascendancy of Donald Trump, whom Kempton took seriously in the 1980s; the reckoning of the Black Lives Matter movement; the disappearance of daily newspapers; and the crises of homelessness and mass incarceration.
Especially among reporters themselves, Kempton’s name is invoked with the kind of reverence reserved not merely for a master of the craft but for one of the profession’s virtuoso stylists and a paragon of journalistic integrity.
Praise for Going Around
All we journalists were in awe of Murray, not simply because he knew more than we did, but because he could do more with what he knew. —Garry Wills, author of Lincoln at Gettysburg
Holter, an independent historical researcher, has gathered nearly 90 articles and editorials “from every period in Kempton’s career.” Many are outstanding…Reading Kempton reminds us that, no matter the chaos, justice and human dignity are within our reach. —Kirkus Reviews Starred Review
This is a vital collection for all who remain committed to journalism as an art form. Just as splendidly as it did decades ago, Kempton’s writing reminds us of all this medium can and must continue to do. —Osita Nwanevu, contributing editor at The New Republic and columnist at The Guardian
When and if the dust finally settles on the American Century, Murray Kempton will prove to have been one of its greatest writers: almost miraculously immersed in every region, profession, political movement, and social class, he leaves behind a body of work whose range (seven decades!) and moral ambition seem nothing short of majestic. This new anthology rescues him from a pile of clippings and lets his voice ring out even more clearly than it did during his life.—Benjamin Moser, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Sontag: Her Life and Work
Murray Kempton wrote stately, measured prose in the tradition of Gibbon and Macauley, and within hours of publication it was used to wrap fish. He was also one of the great moral witnesses of his time, there on the sidewalk for 60-odd years, bringing his gimlet eye and sense of justice and solidarity—formed by his Episcopalian-bishop forebears and the IWW—to bear through the darkest and most hopeful times of the late twentieth century. I’m very happy there is at last a representative selection of his work, with a moving introductory portrait by Darryl Pinckney to put flesh on the bones.—Lucy Sante, author of I Heard Her Call My Name
Murray Kempton is a reference point for an entire era of American journalism. Erudite, slyly comic and consistently elegant, his work chronicled the high, the low and the salient points in between. Going Around is a compendium of the scribe at his finest—an illustration of how the adjective ’Kemptonian’ came to be synonymous with high praise. —Jelani Cobb, dean of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism
The man is a marvel. It’s like listening to Louis Armstrong, or Roy Eldridge: you don’t know where the hell he is going, but somehow he gets there and it knocks your socks off. – Frank Sinatra
