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The Breslin Era | The Point Magazine

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When I was 23, and tasked with covering a mayoral race in New York, the dazzling dungeon of a city in which I was raised, I read and reread a long magazine article written by Jimmy Breslin. The first-person feature, published in a July 1969 issue of New York magazine, does not truly belong to the J.B. canon. It has nothing to do with Kennedy’s gravedigger or a migrant worker drowned in concrete. It did not, unfortunately, make the cut in the new Library of America edition of his work, edited by the columnist Dan Barry. “Is Lindsay Too Tall to Be Mayor?” is Breslin at his most acidic and rollicking, and it’s what made me, ultimately, want to write about politics—and indulge, briefly, in practicing it. Breslin, like a number of writer-intellects of his era, was cajoled into running for office, and teamed up with Norman Mailer, then at the zenith of his acclaim and infamy, to run for New York City Council president while the Armies of the Night author sought the mayoralty. Breslin, then i

When I was 23, and tasked with covering a mayoral race in New York, the dazzling dungeon of a city in which I was raised, I read and reread a long magazine article written by Jimmy Breslin. The first-person feature, published in a July 1969 issue of New York magazine, does not truly belong to the J.B. canon. It has nothing to do with Kennedy’s gravedigger or a migrant worker drowned in concrete. It did not, unfortunately, make the cut in the new Library of America edition of his work, edited by the columnist Dan Barry. “Is Lindsay Too Tall to Be Mayor?” is Breslin at his most acidic and rollic

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