Murray Kempton

James Murray Kempton (December 16, 1917 – May 5, 1997) was an American journalist and social and political commentator. He won a National Book Award in 1974 (category, "Contemporary Affairs") for The Briar Patch: The People of the State of New York versus Lumumba Shakur, et al. Reprinted, 1997, with new subtitle The Trial of the Panther 21.) He won a Pulitzer Prize (category, "Commentary") in 1985 "for witty and insightful reflection on public issues in 1984 and throughout a distinguished career."

Kempton was born on December 16, 1917 in Baltimore, the son of Sally Ambler and James Branson Kempton, a stock broker. Kempton's father died of influenza shortly after his birth, leaving the family in financial straits. He worked as a copyboy for H. L. Mencken at the Baltimore Evening Sun. He entered Johns Hopkins in 1935, where he was editor-in-chief of the Johns Hopkins News-Letter.

After his graduation in 1939, he worked for a short time as a labor organizer, then joined the staff of the New 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 the U.S. Army Air Forces during World War II and was stationed in New Guinea and the Philippines. He rejoined New York Post in 1949 as labor editor and later as a columnist. He also wrote for the NYC-based World-Telegram and Sun and a short-lived successor, the World Journal Tribune, a merger between the Telegram, the New York Herald-Tribune, and the New York Journal American. His 1955 book Part of Our Time: Some Ruins and Monuments of the Thirties was a farewell to his youthful Communism. During 1958 and '59 he spent a year in Rome on a scholarship of the U.S.-Italy Fulbright Commission.

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