New York tabloid legend Jimmy Breslin is back in the news.
Page Six hears three projects about the famed columnist — who died in 2017 — are on the horizon.
We’re told the Library of America is set to publish a collection of his selected columns and book excerpts edited by Dan Barry, followed a few months later by a definitive biography, “The Man Who Told The Truth” by former Postie Richard Esposito.
Esposito tells us that he spoke with everyone from Breslin’s first editor to Tom Wolfe to his friends (similarly legendary former Post editors) Pete Hamill and Steve Dunleavy for the bio.
And he says Breslin himself and his family cooperated extensively.
It’ll be out on Otto Penzler’s new imprint, Crime Ink, and distributed by W.W. Norton.
Meanwhile, there’s word of yet another book about Breslin — who worked for the Herald Tribune, the Daily News, Newsday and the Daily Beast in his long career, as well as writing books including the “Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight,” this one from Simon and Schuster, “much further down the road.”
“It’s an honor having the opportunity to write about Jimmy Breslin,” Esposito told us, “I met the Bard of Queens Blvd. when I was a copyboy and worked with him as city editor at Newsday. He never stopped reporting, or writing poetry.”
“Breslin changed—for the better—journalism in America. He didn’t just report the facts. He strove to tell the truth.. Writing about him — and the research it entailed — was an incredible experience.”
Asked why he wanted to write the book, he said, “Because I felt the Jimmy Breslin not only helped create New Journalism but used his gifts to cover more than five decades if American life. It is a career any serious student of journalism needs to study.”
Breslin famously covered the Son of Sam murders and wrote a much-celebrated article for which he interviewed the man who dug JFK’s grave.
