Jimmy Breslin, columnist who chronicled wise guys and underdogs, dies

Jimmy Breslin, columnist who chronicled wise guys and underdogs, dies

NEW YORK — Jimmy Breslin, the New York City newspaper columnist and best-selling author who leveled the powerful and elevated the powerless for more than 50 years with brick-hard words and a jagged-glass wit, died Sunday at his home in Manhattan.

With prose that was savagely funny, deceptively simple and poorly imitated, Mr. Breslin created his own distinct rhythm in the hurly-burly music of newspapers.

Here, for example, is how he described Clifton Pollard, the man who dug President John F. Kennedy’s grave, in a celebrated column from 1963 that launched legions of journalists to find their “gravedigger”:

Avoid the media scrum gathered around the winner, he would advise, and go directly to the loser’s locker.

Mr. Breslin also wrote about the sentencing of the union gangster Anthony Provenzano, the assassination of Malcolm X, and a stable of New York characters real and loosely based on reality, including the Mafia boss Un Occhio, the arsonist Marvin the Torch, and the bookie Fat Thomas.