Jimmy Breslin, a legendary New York City columnist, died at age 86, the New York Daily News reported. The Pulitzer Prize-winning, self-described "street reporter" was best known for his unique style of writing and reporting that focused on the Everyman. The cause of death is not known, although Breslin had been recovering from pneumonia recently.

Writing for the Herald Tribune about the funeral for President John F. Kennedy, Breslin chose to interview the gravedigger instead of attending the memorial service. The column embodied Breslin's incomparable style, as as Dan Barry of The New York Times noted:

Pollard is forty-two. He is a slim man with a mustache who was born in Pittsburgh and served as a private in the 352nd Engineers battalion in Burma in World War II. He is an equipment operator, grade 10, which means he gets $3.01 an hour. One of the last to serve John Fitzgerald Kennedy, who was the thirty-fifth President of this country, was a working man who earns $3.01 an hour and said it was an honor to dig the grave.

Breslin became so well known that the "Son of Sam" decided to correspond with him during his reign of terror. "Hello from the gutters of N.Y.C. which are filled with dog manure, vomit, stale wine, urine, and blood," the killer, David Berkowitz, wrote to Breslin in 1977. "Hello from the cracks in the sidewalks of N.Y.C. and from the ants that dwell in these cracks and feed on the dried blood of the dead that has settled into the cracks."

He won the Pulitzer Prize in part for his column profiling a young man struggling with AIDS in 1985. The Pulitzer board chose to honor Breslin for his "columns which consistently champion ordinary citizens."

Breslin was a sometimes divisive figure, as the New York Times wrote:

He often went after his own, from Irish-Americans with "shopping center faces" who had forgotten their hardscrabble roots to the Roman Catholic Church, whose sex scandals prompted him to write an angry book called "The Church That Forgot Christ," published in 2004. It ends with his cheeky vow to start a new church that would demand more low-income housing and better posture.

Of his writing style and inspiration, Breslin once said, "Rage is the only quality which has kept me, or anybody I have ever studied, writing columns for newspapers."

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