Seven Stories Press

A definitive collection of the writings of legendary, Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and reporter Murray Kempton (1917-1997), Going Around gathers dozens of columns, articles and essays, from The New York Post, The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, and Newsday, among others, most never before collected in book form.

“The man is a marvel. It’s like listening to Louis Armstrong, or Roy Eldridge: you don’t know where the hell he is going, but somehow he gets there and it knocks your socks off.” —Frank Sinatra

Known for riding his bicycle around New York City in three-piece suits and polished oxfords while listening to his CD Walkman and smoking a pipe, Kempton possessed a roving and unconventional mind, which often led him to the toughest issues of the day—especially the Civil Rights Movement—which he covered with wit and a breathtaking sense of moral urgency. Whether he was describing a hardscrabble coal town in Western Maryland, a bus carrying Freedom Riders through Mississippi, or an encampment of guerrillas in El Salvador, Kempton had a knack for saying the things that no other reporter could or would, writing unequivocally in a way that made him a hero to other writers and editors.

Here is a legendary figure of journalism, whom David Remnick once described as “the greatest newspaperman in town."

“Murray Kempton wrote stately, measured prose in the tradition of Gibbon and Macauley, and within hours of publication it was used to wrap fish. He was also one of the great moral witnesses of his time, there on the sidewalk for 60-odd years, bringing his gimlet eye and sense of justice and solidarity--formed by his Episcopalian-bishop forebears and the IWW--to bear through the darkest and most hopeful times of the late twentieth century. I'm very happy there is at last a representative selection of his work, with a moving introductory portrait by Darryl Pinckney to put flesh on the bones.”

– Lucy Sante, author of I Heard Her Call My Name

“When and if the dust finally settles on the American Century, Murray Kempton will prove to have been one of its greatest writers: almost miraculously immersed in every region, profession, political movement, and social class, he leaves behind a body of work whose range (seven decades!) and moral ambition seem nothing short of majestic. This new anthology rescues him from a pile of clippings and lets his voice ring out even more clearly than it did during his life.”

– Benjamin Moser, winner of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Biography

“This is a vital collection for all who remain committed to journalism as an art form. Just as splendidly as it did decades ago, Kempton's writing reminds us of all this medium can and must continue to do.”

– Osita Nwanevu, contributing editor at The New Republic and columnist at The Guardian

“Murray Kempton is a reference point for an entire era of American journalism. Erudite, slyly comic and consistently elegant, his work chronicled the high, the low and the salient points in between. Going Around is a compendium of the scribe at his finest—an illustration of how the adjective 'Kemptonian' came to be synonymous with high praise.”

– Jelani Cobb, dean of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism

“All we journalists were in awe of Murray, not simply because he knew more than we did, but because he could do more with what he knew.”

– Garry Wills, author of Lincoln at Gettysburg

Going Around

Selected Journalism

by Murray Kempton, edited by Andrew Holter

Buying options