Background
Abbott Joseph Liebling was born on October 18, 1904 in New York City, New York, United States. He was the son of Joseph Liebling, a well-to-do furrier, and of Anna Slone.
(One of the most gifted American journalists of the twenti...)
One of the most gifted American journalists of the twentieth century, A. J. Liebling learned his craft as a newspaper reporter before joining The New Yorker in 1935. This volume collects five books that demonstrate his extraordinary vitality and versatility as a writer. Named the best sports book of all time by Sports Illustrated in 2002, The Sweet Science (1956) offers a lively and idiosyncratic portrait of boxing in the early 1950s that encompasses boastful managers, veteran trainers, wily cornermen, and the fighters themselves: Joe Louis, Rocky Marciano, Sugar Ray Robinson, and Archie Moore, “a virtuoso of anachronistic perfection.” No one has captured the fierce artistry of the ring like Liebling. “A boxer,” he observed, “like a writer, must stand alone.” A classic of reporting, The Earl of Louisiana (1961) is a vivid account of Governor Earl Long’s bid for reelection after his release from a mental asylum in 1959—and an insightful look at Southern politics during the civil rights era. The Jollity Building (1962) collects hilarious stories about Manhattan cigar-store owners, night-club promoters, and the scheming “Telephone Booth Indians” of Broadway, as well as a profile of “The Honest Rainmaker,” the racing columnist and confidence man extraordinaire Colonel John R. Stingo. An unabashed celebration of the pleasures of unrestrained eating, Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris (1962) is a richly evocative memoir of Liebling’s lifelong love for Paris and French food and wine. The Press (1964) brings together the best of Liebling’s influential “Wayward Press” pieces, in which he perceptively examined the flaws of American journalism and presciently warned of the dangers of consolidated media ownership. “Freedom of the press,” he wrote, “is guaranteed only to those who own one.” LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.
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(A collection of New Yorker columns describes the ups and ...)
A collection of New Yorker columns describes the ups and downs of life in New York in the 1930s and some of the unusual people who made the city the way it was
https://www.amazon.com/Back-Where-Came-J-Liebling/dp/0865474257?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=0865474257
(Essays describe everyday life in wartorn Europe, and depi...)
Essays describe everyday life in wartorn Europe, and depict the experiences of the ordinary American soldier fighting the war
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(Portrait of Chicago with cartoon illustrations by Saul St...)
Portrait of Chicago with cartoon illustrations by Saul Steinberg. Based on articles that originally appeared in the New Yorker magazine.
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(One of the most gifted and influential American journalis...)
One of the most gifted and influential American journalists of the 20th century, A. J. Liebling spent five years reporting the dramatic events and myriad individual stories of World War II. As a correspondent for The New Yorker, Liebling wrote with a passionate commitment to Allied victory, an unfailing attention to telling details, and an appreciation for the literary challenges presented by the ?discursive, centrifugal, both repetitive and disparate? nature of war. This volume brings together three books along with 26 uncollected New Yorker pieces and two excerpts from The Republic of Silence (1947), Liebling?s collection of writing from the French Resistance. The Road Back to Paris (1944) narrates Liebling?s experiences from September 1939 to March 1943, including his shock at the fall of France and dismay at isolationist indifference in the United States; it contains classic accounts of a winter voyage on a Norwegian tanker during the Battle of the Atlantic, visits to front-line airfields in North Africa, and the defeat of a veteran panzer division by American troops in Tunisia. Mollie and Other War Pieces (1964) brings together Liebling?s portrait of a legendary nonconformist American soldier in North Africa with his eyewitness account of Omaha Beach on D-Day, evocative reports from Normandy, and investigation of a German atrocity in rural France. In Normandy Revisited (1958) Liebling writes about his return to France in 1955 and recalls the joyous liberation of his beloved Paris while exploring with bittersweet perception how wartime experience is transformed into memory. The selection of uncollected New Yorker pieces includes a profile of an RAF ace, surveys of the French underground press, and an encounter with a captured collaborator in Brittany, as well as postwar reflections on battle fatigue, Ernie Pyle, and the writing of military history. With maps and chronology. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.
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( A.J. Liebling's classic New Yorker pieces on the "sweet...)
A.J. Liebling's classic New Yorker pieces on the "sweet science of bruising" bring vividly to life the boxing world as it once was. It depicts the great events of boxing's American heyday: Sugar Ray Robinson's dramatic comeback, Rocky Marciano's rise to prominence, Joe Louis's unfortunate decline. Liebling never fails to find the human story behind the fight, and he evokes the atmosphere in the arena as distinctly as he does the goings-on in the ring--a combination that prompted Sports Illustrated to name The Sweet Science the best American sports book of all time.
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Abbott Joseph Liebling was born on October 18, 1904 in New York City, New York, United States. He was the son of Joseph Liebling, a well-to-do furrier, and of Anna Slone.
He attended New York City schools and entered Dartmouth College in 1920. After being expelled from Dartmouth in 1923 for failure to attend chapel (he later described himself as "an agnostic of Jewish origin"), Liebling enrolled in the School of Journalism at Columbia University. He graduated in 1925 with the Bachelor of Letters. In 1926 Liebling went to Paris and studied at the Sorbonne. In Paris he also learned about French cooking, which engaged his interest and zestful appetite from then on.
Liebling started his career at the sports department of the New York Times. After eight months, he was fired because he gave the name "Ignoto" to a basketball referee whose name he did not know. In 1927, he was employed by the Providence Journal and the Evening Bulletin for nearly three years as a reporter and feature writer. ("I oozed prose over every aspect of Rhode Island life. ") In 1930 Liebling left because a staff member was fired to make room for an advertiser's son.
He returned to New York, where he worked on the World Telegram. After four years with that paper (1931 - 1935), during which he wrote more than a thousand feature articles, he asked for, and was refused, a raise. He left, and for a while worked on King Features' Evening Journal Magazine. In 1935, Liebling was hired at the New Yorker by editor Harold Ross; he remained with the magazine for the rest of his life. His unpretentious and irreverent style of writing and his accurate, even scholarly, reporting pleased Ross, who during the 1930's hired a number of former newspapermen: Alva Johnston; Joseph Mitchell, who became Liebling's close friend; and Meyer Berger. These writers constituted, Liebling said, "a second New Yorker generation" after E. B. White, James Thurber, Wolcott Gibbs, and Robert Benchley.
Liebling's first book, Back Where I Came From (1938), containing pieces from the World-Telegram as well as from the New Yorker, describes New York, the only city he preferred to Paris, with amused affection. He knew the town intimately; walked its streets continually; liked the sound of Broadway speech, the sporting talk, and what he called "the side-street New York language. " In October 1939, Liebling was sent to Paris to report the early phases of World War II. His affection for France and French culture, dating from his student days, had never lapsed; but the quality of French cooking, he observed, had declined.
In 1940 he returned to New York, and in July 1941 he flew to Britain to cover the activities of the Royal Air Force. When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Liebling was sailing home on a Norwegian tanker. His account of the voyage, "Westbound Tanker, " is one of his many superb pieces of World War II reportage. Liebling's second book, Telephone Booth Indian (1942), focused on the marvels the author found in the half-mile-square area bounded by Sixth and Eighth avenues and by Forty-second and Fifty-third streets. Liebling later covered American air attacks from England, the African campaign, and D-Day. He also followed the U. S. First Infantry Division into northern France, and was in Paris in August 1944, when the city was liberated. Much of his war correspondence for the New Yorker is gathered in three books: The Road Back to Paris (1944), Normandy Revisited (1958), and Mollie and Other War Pieces (1964).
After the war Liebling began writing "The Wayward Press, " a New Yorker department Robert Benchley had originated in the 1930's. A sharp, satiric, and knowledgeable critic, Liebling wittily exposed the vagaries and shortcomings of newspapers and newspapermen. Max Lerner wrote editorials, he said, "like an elephant treading the dead body of a mouse into the floor of its cage. " Liebling contended that a large number of competing newspapers presenting various shades of thought were "the country's best defense against being stampeded into barbarism. " He deplored the decrease and decline of dailies and the lack of diversity in news sources. The first collection of "The Wayward Press" pieces appeared in 1947 with the title The Wayward Pressman. Liebling lived in Chicago in 1948-1949 and had a long-standing feud with Colonel Robert R. McCormick of the Chicago Tribune. McCormick and his newspaper were the targets of some of Liebling's sharpest barbs. And his book Chicago: The Second City (1952) stirred much controversy. Liebling continued to be a critic of the press to the end of his life. At the time of his final illness, he was doing a study of the reaction of southern newspapers to President John Kennedy's assassination.
Liebling wrote also on a number of other subjects like boxing, food, language, the raffish characters who peopled what Harold Ross called New York City's "low life, " France, horse racing (going to a race, he said, "fills the lungs and empties the mind"), and colorful politicians like Earl Long, about whom he wrote an eminently readable study, The Earl of Lousiana (1961).
Liebling was essentially a magazine writer. Nearly all of his fifteen books--seventeen if They All Sang (1934) by Edward B. Marks, "as told to Abbott J. Liebling, " and The Most of A. J. Liebling (1963), an anthology selected by William Cole, are counted--are made up of New Yorker articles, sometimes extensively rewritten. His expanded boxing articles appeared as The Sweet Science (1956) and the second collection of "Wayward Press" pieces was The Press (1961).
In The Jollity Building (1962) he wrote again about the sharp-witted characters who scramble for dollars on Broadway: orchestra leaders, song pluggers, bookmakers, theatrical agents, and assorted promoters. Liebling claimed the four most interesting men he knew were Harold Ross; Raymond Weeks, who taught Romance philology at Columbia; police reporter Max Fischel of the New York Evening World; and the great black boxer Sam Langford, who delighted Liebling by saying, "You can sweat out beer and you can sweat out whiskey, but you can't sweat out women. " Liebling celebrated Paris and Parisian cooking in Between Meals (1962). In Mollie and Other War Pieces, as in his earlier books, his writing was, as the critic Joseph Epstein said, "urbane without cuteness, skeptical without sourness, and witty in a way that was at bottom serious. " He died in New York City.
(A collection of New Yorker columns describes the ups and ...)
(Essays describe everyday life in wartorn Europe, and depi...)
(One of the most gifted and influential American journalis...)
(One of the most gifted American journalists of the twenti...)
(Portrait of Chicago with cartoon illustrations by Saul St...)
( A.J. Liebling's classic New Yorker pieces on the "sweet...)
Quotations:
"American cities with competing newspapers will soon be so rare as those with two telephone systems. "
"Chicago after nightfall is a small city of the rich who have not yet migrated, visitors, and hoodlums, surrounded by a large expanse of juxtaposed dimnesses. "
"There's more fun in boxing than in any other game. It's a sanctioned release of hostility. "
"Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one. "
"People everywhere confuse what they read in newspapers with news. "
In his last years he was overweight and nearsighted, and had chronic gout but he still reacted to life with gusto. Brendan Gill, his New Yorker colleague for many years, said Liebling looked "like some eighteenth century Franciscan monk, with a big belly, a bald pate, and small lively eyes behind old-fashioned, thick-lensed glasses. .. . He was sensual and vain and talented and extremely hard-working. "
On July 28, 1934, Liebling married Ann Beatrice McGinn. In 1949, he divorced his first wife and married Lucille Hill Spectorsky. After his second marriage ended in divorce in 1959, he married on April 3 of that year the novelist Jean Stafford. He had no children with any of his wives.