Lawrence Wright on A. J. Liebling's "The Great State"

"During the 1959 session of the Louisiana state legislature, Governor Earl Long, the less famous younger brother of Senator Huey Long, "went off his rocker," as the tickled writer A. J. Liebling recounted in this magazine, adding, "The papers reported that he had cursed and hollered at the legislators, saying things that so embarrassed his wife, Miz Blanche, and his relatives that they had packed him off to Texas in a National Guard plane to get his brains repaired in an asylum.""

""I am a chronic, incurable, recidivist reporter," he confessed. And Liebling once boasted to a friend, "I write better than anyone who writes faster, and faster than anyone who writes better." Among sportswriters, he was esteemed for his boxing coverage. His unapologetic passion for food, evidenced by his waistline, was one of the great romances in literary journalism. As he saw it, dieting represented an absolute evil: "If there is to be a world cataclysm,"

A. J. Liebling joined The New Yorker in 1935 and became known as a humorous, versatile observer of the human condition. Liebling described himself as a chronic, incurable, recidivist reporter and claimed unmatched speed and quality in his writing. He gained esteem for boxing coverage and maintained an outspoken passion for food, deriding dieting in vivid terms. He led The Wayward Press column to critique the press, calling it "the weak slat under the bed of democracy." Despite nearsightedness and gout, his wartime reporting earned the French Legion of Honor. He died at fifty-nine.

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