Going Around: Selected Journalism (Seven Stories Press) is the first career-spanning collection of writings by the legendary New York City reporter Murray Kempton (1917-1997).

Inspired by plans for a volume left unfinished by New York Review of Books editor Barbara Epstein, it draws from thousands of columns, essays, reviews, and other journalism across seven decades to recover one of the most distinctive voices in 20th-century American nonfiction. The book features a foreword by the novelist and essayist Darryl Pinckney and an introduction by me. The jacket photograph is by Dominique Nabokov.

Reviews: Kirkus Reviews (starred), The New York Times, The Nation, The Bulwark, The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, featured on Stanford Law School’s 2025 Summer Faculty Reading List

Praise for Going Around:

I have just finished reading Going Around, a new selection of Kempton’s journalistic writings, and the man himself feels alive in the room.

– Vivian Gornick, The Nation

Murray Kempton wrote stately, measured prose in the tradition of Gibbon and Macauley, and within hours of publication it was used to wrap fish. He was also one of the great moral witnesses of his time, there on the sidewalk for 60-odd years, bringing his gimlet eye and sense of justice and solidarity—formed by his Episcopalian-bishop forebears and the IWW—to bear through the darkest and most hopeful times of the late twentieth century. I'm very happy there is at last a representative selection of his work, with a moving introductory portrait by Darryl Pinckney to put flesh on the bones.

– Lucy Sante, author of I Heard Her Call My Name: A Memoir of Transition

When and if the dust finally settles on the American Century, Murray Kempton will prove to have been one of its greatest writers: almost miraculously immersed in every region, profession, political movement, and social class, he leaves behind a body of work whose range (seven decades!) and moral ambition seem nothing short of majestic. This new anthology rescues him from a pile of clippings and lets his voice ring out even more clearly than it did during his life.

– Benjamin Moser, author of Sontag: A Life

This is a vital collection for all who remain committed to journalism as an art form. Just as splendidly as it did decades ago, Kempton's writing reminds us of all this medium can and must continue to do.

– Osita Nwanevu, The New Republic

We used to have journalists whose beat was the life of their community, who took their bikes around the city to report on what was happening and wore out the soles of their shoes chasing stories. And if we had that once, we can have it again, even if it must come back to us in some new form. Let Kempton show us how it was once done.

– Roz Milner, The Bulwark

All we journalists were in awe of Murray, not simply because he knew more than we did, but because he could do more with what he knew.

– Garry Wills, author of Lincoln at Gettysburg

Reading Kempton reminds us that, no matter the chaos, justice and human dignity are within our reach.

– Kirkus Reviews (starred)

Murray Kempton was a man of the 20th century, and his dispatches provide an excellent guide to American concerns of the time (many of them are even bigger concerns now). As Going Around (Seven Stories Press, edited by Andrew Holter) demonstrates, Kempton’s columns and reporting still have a lot to tell us, and Darryl Pinckney’s stirring foreword reminds us that journalism can be art, particularly when performed by a man whose moral imagination was matched by his thoughtful prose.

– Kate Tuttle, The Boston Globe

For a certain kind of New Yorker—an aficionado of the mid-20th-century cultural firmament, a sucker for eccentrics, big lives, mob bosses, criminal trials and especially poetic denunciations of hypocrisy, false piety and artifice of any kind—it has been a slog waiting around for the compiled works of Murray Kempton. …Going Around, assembled by a young writer named Andrew Holter, arrives now, delivering more than 400 pages of Kempton’s journalism—dozens of pieces from his years at The New York Post and Newsday, his dalliance with The New Republic and his long tenure as a contributor to The New York Review of Books.

– Ginia Bellafante, The New York Times

Murray Kempton is a reference point for an entire era of American journalism. Erudite, slyly comic and consistently elegant, his work chronicled the high, the low and the salient points in between. Going Around is a compendium of the scribe at his finest—an illustration of how the adjective 'Kemptonian' came to be synonymous with high praise.

– Jelani Cobb, The New Yorker

Intrepid, cerebral, equal parts old-fashioned manners and revolution-curious politics—Kempton produced 11,000 newspaper columns, as well as books, essays and pamphlets, in the six decades bracketed by the presidential second terms of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Bill Clinton. …Those interested in an anecdotal review of the 20th century could do worse than to peruse this volume….

– Charles Lane, The Wall Street Journal