The Briar Patch

James Murray Kempton was an influential American journalist. He won a Pulitzer Prize for journalism in 1985 and won the 1974 U.S. National Book Award in category Contemporary Affairs for The Briar Patch: The People of the State of New York versus Lumumba Shakur, et al. Kempton was born in... Baltimore on December 16, 1917. His mother was Sally Ambler and his father was James Branson Kempton, a stock broker. Kempton's father died of influenza shortly after his birth, leaving the family in financial straits. Kempton worked as a copyboy for H. L. Mencken at the Baltimore Evening Sun. He entered Johns Hopkins in 1935, where he was editor-in-chief of the Johns Hopkins News-Letter. After his graduation in 1939, he worked for a short time as a labor organizer, then joined the staff of the New York Post, earning a reputation for a quietly elegant prose style that featured long but rhythmic sentences, a flair for irony, and gentle, almost scholarly sarcasm. He served in the U.S. Air Force during World War II and was stationed in New Guinea and the Philippines.
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