Newsday’s Kempton to be honored at Colby

WATERVILLE — Murray Kempton, a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for New York Newsday, is the 1995 Elijah Parish Lovejoy Fellow and will accept the award at the 43rd Lovejoy Convocation Nov. 9 at Colby College.

Kempton will receive an honorary degree and deliver the annual Lovejoy Lecture at 8 p.m. Nov. 9 at Lorimer Chapel. He also will take part in a national conference, “The Media and the Internet,” to be held at 11 a.m. the same day at Colby.

Kempton was called “the greatest columnist since Mencken” by The New Yorker this summer, and The New York Times Book Review said Kempton is “as inimitable as he is indispensable.”

Kempton began his career in journalism as a labor reporter for the New York Post in 1942, and served in the Army during World War II. He returned to the Post in 1947 and became a columnist two years later. He also was an editor at The New Republic and a free-lance writer for some years in the 1960s, but otherwise has been a columnist since 1949. He has written for New York Newsday from 1981 until its closing this year, and continues columns for Long Island Newsday and The New York Review of Books.