Marvin Kitman

Marvin Kitman (November 24, 1929 – June 29, 2023) was an American television critic, humorist, and author. He was a columnist for Newsday for 35 years and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 1982. Kitman was the author of nine books, including two on George Washington that combine humor with extensive historical research.

Early life and education Kitman was born on November 24, 1929, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to Jewish parents who had immigrated from Russia. In any case, he remained a fan of the Pittsburgh Pirates throughout his life. graduating in 1947.

He attended Baruch College in New York City, and there developed an aptitude for writing.

Kitman was drafted into the U.S. Army, where he served from 1953 to 1955 during the Korean War. During this time, he was a member of the 47th Infantry Regiment in the 9th Infantry Division stationed at Fort Dix. Among his duties was serving as a sportswriter for the Fort Dix base newspaper.

Beginning in 1963, Kitman became a managing editor of Monocle, a satirical magazine of the 1950s and 1960s. He also worked as a staff writer for The Saturday Evening Post during 1965–66. ) He ran as a "Lincoln Republican" who would finish the unmet campaign promises of 1864, such as providing for civil rights, and said that accordingly "I am the only truly reactionary Republican in the race." Kitman said the delegate pledged to him received 725 votes in the primary, but that he was demanding a recount as "there was some kind of fraud in my getting so many." He carried his campaign on a bit further, including staging a $1-a-plate fundraising dinner at a self-service cafeteria in New York. In reaction to the 1983 television film Kentucky Woman, starring ex-Charlie's Angels lead Cheryl Ladd in a serious role, Kitman wrote, "Cheryl Ladd as a coal miner was a very moving television experience. It made me want to convert to nuclear power." Regarding his need to judge television news programs, he summed that he had spent "thirty-five years of getting paid to watch the bad, the bemused, and the blond of TV news." He coined the so-called Kitman's Law: "On the TV screen pure drivel tends to drive off ordinary drivel." Writer Bob Klapisch has described Kitman's style as "like sarcasm dried to a delicate crisp." A former colleague who later became an executive director at Stony Brook University's School of Communication and Journalism said of Kitman, "He was a distinct voice, an original, and whether you were put off by his work or loved him, he was one of a kind – funny, irreverent, perhaps insufferable on occasion but never dull." He was also a frequent panelist on the show All About TV which appeared on WNYC-TV. He had a radio show known as "Watching TV" on the RKO Radio Network in the early 1980s.

Author Kirkus Reviews said of 1969's You Can't Judge a Book By Its Cover, a collection of humor pieces by Kitman, "He talks and he talks ... but he talks. Yet the groggy reader is usually jarred into ordering more coffee and reading on." Kitman wrote several other books that were explicit humorist efforts. He also wrote about television, in particular in I Am a VCR (1988), which was about the effect watching television constantly for two decades was having on the author.

Kitman was a co-creator and co-writer, along with Jim Bouton and Vic Ziegel, of the short-lived 1976 television situation comedy Ball Four, based upon Bouton's book of the same name. It gave Kitman a chance to see the television creative process from the inside. As he later recalled: "It was the constant rewriting at night, how everyone was always so exhausted. And the input from the executives – all they knew about writing was the alphabet, but they were the ones who kept saying, 'This is the way it's always been done.'" Kitman's theme is that Washington foreshadowed the modern practice of maintaining, and sometimes manipulating, expense accounts. The book made the New York Times Book Review'''s "New and Recommended" list; a profile from that paper noted Kitman's "serious digging in various archives" and said that "Kitman's interpretation keep crossing the line that divides verity from travesty." it was published in 1989 and sought to explore how Washington and his supporters managed to get into a position where he was unopposed in the 1788–89 United States presidential election. It again drew comic parallels between those events and politics in modern times. British historian Marcus Cunliffe did not quibble with the accuracy of George Washington's Expense Account but found its interpretation comparing Washington to modern practices too stretched. And American historian Francis Jennings cited George Washington's Expense Account regarding the subject's drinking habits, and noted that it contains "hilarious and fully documented analysis" and that "as my trade's custom is to deplore such irreverence, let it be noted that the book includes a facsimile of the account in question."

In 2007, Kitman published a biography of the popular but controversial television commentator Bill O'Reilly. The New York Times praised Kitman for doing Boswellian amounts of research and constructing a well-written narrative, but ultimately concluded that the positive aspect of the portrayal was "unconvincing" and a "mash note". Nevertheless, O'Reilly hated the book, apparently because Kitman addressed the 2004 sexual harassment charges against the star by one of his program's female producers, and refused to follow through on what Kitman said was an agreement to feature the author and the book on the show. As a result, sales of the book suffered, as did Kitman's opinion of O'Reilly. )

Later years After ending his Newsday column, Kitman remained active in that idiom, well into his eighties and then nineties. In 2008, he wrote a regular column for the Huffington Post. Subsequently he voiced unhappiness over that site's disinclination to pay its contributors. During 2011–12, he wrote columns on business, media, and politics for the Investor uprising business information site, which did pay. But it then folded. Such posts continued through 2020, Subsequently Kitman made his "Justaminuteman" postings and other observations on politics on the Twitter and Substack platforms.

Death Kitman died of cancer on June 29, 2023, at the Lillian Booth Actors Home in Englewood, New Jersey. He was 93.

Awards and honors In 1982, Kitman was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.

Kitman was given the Humorous Writing Award from the Society of the Silurians, a New York-based press organization, in 1991 and a Special Commentary Award from the same body in 1993.

Kitman received City College's Townsend Harris Medal in 1992. He was given the James W. Carey Award for Outstanding Media Ecology Journalism from the Media Ecology Association in 2008.

Kitman was inducted into the Brooklyn Tech Hall of Fame in 1998.

Published works The Number One Best Seller: The True Adventures of Marvin Kitman (Dial Press, 1966) The Red Chinese Air Force Exercise, Diet, and Sex Book (Stein & Day, 1968) ["translated by William Randolph Hirsch", pseudonym for Kitman, Richard Lingeman, and Victor Navasky] You Can't Judge a Book By Its Cover (Weybright & Talley, 1969) George Washington's Expense Account (Simon & Schuster, 1970) [co-author with George Washington] (reprinted by Grove, 2001) The Marvin Kitman Show: An Encyclopedia Televisiana (Outerbridge & Diensfrey, 1973) The Coward's Almanac (Doubleday, 1975) [with drawings by Lou Myers] I Am a VCR: The Kitman Tapes (Random House, 1988) The Making of the Prefident 1789: The Unauthorized Campaign Biography (HarperCollins, 1989) The Man Who Would Not Shut Up: The Rise of Bill O'Reilly (St. Martin's Press, 2007) Gullible's Travels: A Comical History of the Trump Era'' (Seven Stories Press, 2020)