Jim Dwyer, Pulitzer Prize-Winning Journalist, Dies at 63 - The New York Times

Jim Dwyer died this morning.  At 63. Lung cancer. Like Jimmy Breslin, he had the common touch. A journalist in the tradition of the Front Page. Like Pete Hamill and Mike McAlary he was a tribune of the people, a reason to buy the New York Daily News or New York Newsday or any paper for which he wrote. He was a veteran of the New Jersey dailies in Jersey City, Elizabeth, and Hackensack.  Jesuit educated (Loyola Prep and Fordham) we had that tribal link.  I had the good fortune to, like him, be a regular for breakfast at Vicky's the local Greek diner on West 187 Street in Washington Heights, now a casualty of covid19.  He loved my yellow Labs, tied up in front of the diner where I sat in the table by the window to keep them calm.  He appreciated their names and personalities: Seamus Heaney, and James J. Muldoon, named for great Irish poets.  His father, who never lost his Irish accent, often joined him for breakfast.  Jim was a character in Nora Ephron's Lucky Guy about McAlary and the other New York tabloid heroes.  Separated at breakfast by the corona virus, I didn't know he was ill.  I'm sorry I did not get to say goodbye to a man who deserved a long life. - GWC
Jim Dwyer, Pulitzer Prize-Winning Journalist, Dies at 63 - The New York Times
By Robert D. McFadden

Jim Dwyer, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, columnist and author whose stylish journalism captured the human dramas of New York City for readers of New York Newsday, The Daily News and The New York Times for nearly four decades, died on Thursday in Manhattan. He was 63.

His death, at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, was announced by Dean Baquet, the executive editor of The Times, and Clifford Levy, the paper’s metropolitan editor, in an email to the Times staff. The cause was complications of lung cancer.

In prose that might have leapt from best-selling novels, Mr. Dwyer portrayed the last minutes of thousands who perished in the collapse of the World Trade Center’s twin towers on Sept. 11, 2001; detailed the terrors of innocent Black youths pulled over and shot by racial-profiling state troopers on the New Jersey Turnpike; and told of the coronavirus besieging a New York City hospital.

Mr. Dwyer won the 1995 Pulitzer for commentary for columns in New York Newsday, and was part of a New York Newsday team that won the 1992 Pulitzer for spot news reporting for coverage of a subway derailment in Manhattan. Colleagues called him a fast, accurate and prolific writer who crusaded against injustice, worked for six metropolitan dailies and wrote or co-wrote six books.

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