ISBN: 0-916870-63-4
368 pp.
Size: 6 x 9
Paperback Original
Price: $10.95
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Wayward Reporter
Raymond Sokolov
A.J. Liebling was the best reporter of his generation. As The New Yorker's press critic, he became the conscience of American journalism. Witty, richly metaphorical, Rabelaisian, he ranged over everything from boxing to politics to French cuisine. Since his death in 1963, he has become the patron saint of young reporters, a legend; but until this book the complex story of his career had never before been told. In between writing his famous "Wayward Press" columns, and several million other words, Liebling married three women-including Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Jean Stafford-became embroiled in the Alger Hiss case, and spent his hours away from the typewriter with such diverse individuals as fight trainer Whitney Bimstein and Albert Camus. Liebling was the first important writer to work in the area between fiction and objective reporting, where Truman Capote and Norman Mailer followed him.
Review: "A moving and powerful biography of the reporter's reporter."
Ben Bagdikian, Washington Post Bookworld
"Sokolov's moving biography does justice to Liebling's complex personality and sympathetically investigates the compulsions underlying his gargantuan appetite, his emotional involvement with women in distress...and the generosity that left him perpetually impecunious."
Publisher's Weekly
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