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dpa
Washington
Columnist Jimmy Breslin, a Pulitzer Prize winner who famously documented American life and still wrote weekly to the end of his life in the New York Daily News, died Sunday at age 88, the newspaper reported.
During a nearly 70-year career, he wrote for a succession of papers in the United States' largest metropolis: The News, Newsday, the New York Herald Tribune and New York Journal American.
Breslin started in news rooms as a copy editor and moved to sports writing before turning his eye for the common man to news and eventually column writing.
He was a recognizable figure on television, too, where he was a regular on talk shows as a cigar-chomping, hard-bitten commentator.
His Herald Tribune story about the labourer who made 3.01 dollars an hour to dig President John F~Kennedy's grave after the 1963 assassination remains a landmark of US journalism.
During his career, Breslin's produced a score of best-selling novels and non-fiction books, including works on politics, literature and collections of his columns.
But the Pulitzer committee, in citing Breslin's commentary, noted that his columns"consistently championed ordinary citizens." The winning pieces exposed police torture in a Queens precinct, and took a sympathetic look at the life of an AIDS patient.
