AJ Liebling

It's the birthday of one of the great American journalists of the 20th century, A.J. [Abbott Joseph] Liebling (books by this author), born in New York City (1904), a staff writer for The New Yorker who first made his name covering World War II. He ignored politics and combat strategy and just wrote about day-to-day life among the soldiers and the civilians. He later wrote of the war years: "The times were full of certainties: we could be certain we were right — and we were — and that certainty made us certain that anything we did was right, too. I have seldom been sure I was right since. ... I know that it is socially acceptable to write about war as an unmitigated horror, but subjectively at least, it was not true, and you can feel its pull on men's memories at the maudlin reunions of war divisions. They mourn for their dead, but also for war."
Liebling's three favorite subjects were food, journalism, and boxing. His co-workers said that they heard him laughing every day as he read over drafts of his own articles. He was known to stay up all night at the office, pounding away at the typewriter, and in the morning he'd give himself a half-shower in the office bathroom sink. He became a hero to the journalists who followed him; Tom Wolfe credited him for kicking off the "New Journalism" movement of the 1960s and '70s, as it came to be called. New Journalists valued Liebling for his ability to write factual reporting that read like fiction.
He said, "Freedom of the press belongs to the man who owns one."