Word: kempton
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...columnist Murray Kempton invented the term "the Family" to describe the New York intellectuals--a half-forgotten confraternity of writers and thinkers--clustered roughly around Partisan Review and Commentary. But it was Norman Podhoretz, in his young rooster's memoir, Making It (1968), who gave the term currency. In the Family (Philip Rahv, Mary McCarthy, Dwight Macdonald, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Irving Howe, Harold Rosenberg, Hannah Arendt and others), Podhoretz played a noisy, precocious younger brother, an irritant who would not stay put ideologically. In recoil against the Eisenhower inertia, Podhoretz had steered to the radical left by the early...
...encouragement of that English A section man, and later from Kenneth Payson Kempton in his short story class and Carvel Collins, who gave a wonderful composition course and who steered my to my encounter with Life magazine and thus set my whole professional life in motion, I could hope to make my way as a writer, despite my dismal performance on the Anticipatory Exam...
DIED. MURRAY KEMPTON, 79, maverick, moralistic columnist whose baroque language could never hide an unwavering sympathy for the oppressed and an abiding sense of fair play; in New York City. A liberal labor reporter for the New York Post in 1942, Kempton continued his sometimes quixotic fight for underdogs on the left and right--he even defended the fallen Richard Nixon when the former President was rejected by a New York co-op board. His many awards included a 1985 Pulitzer for his Newsday commentary...
...creating a vacuum into which she brings some fresh air. She lacks Alicia Silverstone's knowing perkiness; Tyler carries the hint of emotional exhaustion in her wide eyes, as if she had just wiped away tears or sleep. Yet she has the impact on these films that Murray Kempton said John Lindsay had on the 1965 New York City mayoral campaign: "He is fresh and everyone else is tired...
...Murray Kempton said the task of editorial writers is to come down out of the hills after the battle is over to shoot the wounded. Is it the job of jackboot reporters in this country to conduct house-to-house searches, ransacking private lives for every disreputable little secret, driving quarry to such humiliation that their only refuge is self-destruction? Shame on my profession! To hell with its venal careerism, its hypocrisy, its prurience, its pietistic ruthlessness...