It is a great American art form, read by millions every day. Taped on refrigerators and tacked up over desks, its wisdom is folded in wallets and emailed among friends. The best of it rises to the level of literature: balancing the urgency of news with the precision of poetry.
Deadline Artists is a celebration of the American newspaper column. This collection features reported columns by masters of the craft including H.L. Mencken, Ernie Pyle, Murray Kempton, Jimmy Breslin, and Mike Royko. It also includes columns by public figures such as Theodore Roosevelt, Orson Welles, Eleanor Roosevelt, Langston Hughes, and Hunter S. Thompson. In our time, voices like Peggy Noonan, Tom Friedman, Carl Hiaasen, David Brooks, and Steve Lopez carry on this tradition.
Newspaper columnists are their readers’ advisers, advocates, and confidants, helping them to make sense of current events while subtly defining the spirit of the age. These columns give readers the chance to view history in the present tense. It also includes appreciations of everyday life: stories of love, loss, laughter and faith—struggles against the odds and long shots that come in.
At a time of great transition in the news media, when obituaries for newspapers are being written every day, Deadline Artists makes the case for the continued relevance of opinion journalism. Beloved but half-remembered columns that were gathering dust in libraries or moldering on microfilm are now available in one volume, celebrating the near-miracle that stories composed on daily deadlines can resonate with beauty and power decades later.
