Reporters from across America and around the globe converged on Washington in November 1963 to cover the state funeral of John F. Kennedy. One, a thirty-five-year-old columnist from New York, turned his attention not on the stricken first family or the assembled world leaders but on Clifton Pollard, the man who dug the president’s grave at Arlington National Cemetery. The result is an indelible portrait of a nation’s grief as expressed in the otherwise anonymous performance of a single, solemn task.

This was Jimmy Breslin’s special gift, to uncover the hidden human dimensions in every story. Brash, cantankerous, and often funny, Breslin was an indefatigable master of deadline writing. His columns were events, attracting millions of readers, winning the admiration of other journalists, and bringing Breslin, in 1986, the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary. As quintessentially New York as the memorable urban characters he portrayed, Breslin emerged as a major national voice, one whose understanding of American life—its political scandals, its Mafia subculture, its indifference to immigrants and other vulnerable people—continues to resonate.

The seventy-three columns and longform magazine articles selected for this volume by editor Dan Barry, more than half collected for the first time, reveal Breslin at his very best. Among the highlights: coverage of the assassination of Malcolm X; dispatches from the South at the height of the Civil Rights Movement and from the war in Vietnam; accounts of his involvement with the “Son of Sam” case as the serial killer terrorized New York City in 1977; the story about John Lennon’s murder in 1980; award-winning writing about police brutality and about the AIDS crisis in the 1980s; and Breslin’s appalled glimpse in 1990 of Donald Trump conning the press corps into covering his every move. Also included are moving personal reflections, such as Breslin’s elegy for his first wife and his tribute to fellow scribe Murray Kempton.

Breslin’s newspaper journalism is joined here by two essential book-length works. How the Good Guys Finally Won: Notes from an Impeachment Summer (1975) offers a vivid narrative of the efforts of House Majority Leader Tip O’Neill, special counsel John Doar, and their associates to bring down President Richard Nixon in the wake of the Watergate break-in and cover-up. The Short Sweet Dream of Eduardo Gutiérrez (2002), the story of an undocumented immigrant laborer killed at a construction site in Brooklyn, exposes a web of malfeasance among developers, contractors, and city officials that enabled the accident to happen.

Dan Barry, editor, is a reporter and columnist for The New York Times. His awards include the Best American Newspaper Narrative Award in 2015; the Meyer “Mike” Berger Award from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism in 2005; and the American Society of Newspaper Editors Award for deadline reporting in 2003. He is the author of several books, including This Land: America, Lost and Found (2018), a collection of his “This Land” columns first published in the Times.