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James Murray Kempton (December 16, 1917 – May 5, 1997) was an influential, Pulitzer Prize-winning...

James Murray Kempton (December 16, 1917 – May 5, 1997) was an influential, Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist. 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 was 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. He joined New York Post in 1949 as labor editor and later as a columnist. He also wrote for the NYC-based World-Telegram and Sun and a short-lived successor, the World Journal Tribune, a merger between the Telegram, the New York Herald-Tribune, and the Journal-American. During the