Atlanta author Paul Hemphill

We’re saddened here at Buzz Central by Saturday’s passing of Atlanta author Paul Hemphill at age 73. But we’re also grateful for the 15 amazing books the journalist left behind for us.

For those in the newspaper trade, Hemphill’s essay, “Quitting the Paper” from his 1981 book, “Too Old to Cry” became an instant classic.

For decades, ink-stained scribbler types have taken solace in the piece. It reassured anyone under the crunch of a daily deadline that a world of possibilities existed outside of a newsroom.

If you were brave enough to chance it the way Paul did.

A big fancy New York City publishing house like Viking just might publish your books too. Jack Kerouac’s agent, Sterling Lord just might hawk your manuscripts.

That is, if you could make a sentence sing the way Paul did.

Heck, you might even tick off a good portion of your family and your Alabama hometown with your memoir, “Leaving Birmingham” all while garnering national critical acclaim.

In short, it always gave under-the-gun journos hope.

Still, the writer didn’t always recommend his gin-fueled method of employment transitioning. To be perfectly frank, dear reader, seven years ago this summer, we also quit this particular paper to accept a glitzy job clear across the country. Before leaving Atlanta, we got Hemphill to sign a copy of his latest novel, “Nobody’s Hero.”

So what did the author of “Leaving Birmingham” and “Qutting the Paper” inscribe?

“Don’t leave. We need you.”

We ended up heeding the thoughtful advice from one of our favorite writing teachers.

As Southerners swap stories about Hemphill today, Buzz dusted off our copy of “Quitting the Paper” to share with readers:

An excerpt from “Quitting the Paper” by Paul Hemphill, Copyright 1981:

“On the Kansas City Star you were forced to learn to write a simple declarative sentence. This is useful to anyone. Newspaper work will not harm a young writer and will help him. If he gets out of it in time.”

— Ernest Hemingway

Late one night in the fall of 1969, with the rain splattering against the front window and the gray light of a television set dancing across the bar, I sat in a booth at Emile’s French Café in downtown Atlanta with a feisty young newspaper reporter named Morris Shelton and methodically proceeded to get paralyzed on Beefeater martinis. By now this had become a daily ritual. I was thirty-three years old. I was the featured columnist for the Atlanta Journal, the largest daily newspaper between Miami and Washington. I had been one of a dozen journalists around the country to be selected to study at Harvard under a Nieman Fellowship the previous year. I fancied myself a sort of Jimmy Breslin of the South, cranking out daily one-thousand-word human dramas on everything from flophouse drunks to Lester Maddox, sufficiently loved and hated by enough people to have that sense of pop celebrity with which most newspapermen delude themselves. I had the most envied newspaper job in Atlanta, if not the South, and now and then I would see a younger writer in a town like Greensboro or Savannah or Montgomery imitating my style just as I had stolen from Hemingway and Breslin and too many others to talk about.. I had been sloppy and inaccurate, from time to time, but I had also written some good stuff. I had hung around all-night eateries and gone to Vietnam and hitchhiked and lain around with hookers and shot pool with Minnesota Fats and sat in cool suburban dens with frustrated housewives.

And yet, with the next column due by dawn, I had run out of gas. I don’t know why men make dramatic decision at the age of thirty-three — change jobs, leave families, kill themselves — but they often do. “You have to remember,” I recalled a friend’s saying as he dumped a secure advertising job and ran off to Hollywood to write scripts, “we are no longer promising young men.” I figured I had written a total of two and a half million words for five newspapers in the previous ten years, at a time when you had to move to another paper and another town for a ten-dollar-a-week raise, and about all I could show for it was bad credit and a drinking problem. Working for the mill, as it were, I was earning from Atlanta Newspapers, Inc. a net of $157.03 a week; I was drinking too much, staying out all night, fighting with my wife, and choking on the notion that perhaps it was as a “well-read local columnist” that I had reached my artistic peak.

“No ideas for tomorrow?” Morris Shelton said, once we had run out of fanciful ways to cuss the paper. Morris was about ten years younger than I, an aggressive young Texan who hadn’t yet chased enough ambulances and beat enough deadlines to be weary of it. He was one of the younger ones on the paper who defended me when the old-timers there called me a prima donna and, once I bailed out, much more vigorous stuff.

“Just a title,” I said.

“You always start with a title?”

“This time I do.”

“What?”

“Something like ‘Quitting the Paper.’ “

“Qutting? You quitting?”

“You’re my star witness, Morris.”

And so we darted through the rain, up to the fourth floor of the old Atlanta Newspapers building, and while he dabbled around the newsroom I called my wife of the time to tell her the apocalypse had arrived (“Come on home and I’ll have a whole bottle ready.”). I turned to my typewriter and rattled a stark memo — “Dear Mac… I’m quitting newspapers because I am sick” — and then we went off to get supremely drunk at Manuel’s Tavern. Manuel Maloof, counselor and padrone to scores of journalists over the years, was at first astounded and then fatherly. “You got a half-million people out there gonna be disappointed,” he said. I said, “Let ‘em all chip in a penny a week.” When Shelton allowed as how maybe he ought to quit, too, I told him it wasn’t his turn yet.

The next morning broke cold and bleak but, somehow, refreshing. There was the feeling that an exorcism had taken place; that I had successfully negotiated the move from one plateau of my life to another; that after ten years of writing magazine pieces and dabbling in non-fiction books, I would then move on to something else, like writing films or novels or both. I heard from Jack Tarver, of Atlanta Newspapers, Inc., around ten o’clock, “astonished,” wanting to know if there had been a personality clash — if so, he said, he could switch me over to the Constitution — but I told him the problem was bigger than that, and we quit as friends. By noon I had an agent in New York, by two o’clock I had a bank loan of $2,500, by five o’clock I had a modest office above a tire-recapping place, and by bedtime I had enough insurance —disability, hospitalization, life — to take care of a Marine platoon in combat. At some point during the day I drifted back to the paper to clean out my desk, while the old-timers glared tight-lipped at one with the audacity to quit (“Well,” one was later quoted as saying, “it takes a certain breed of man to be a newspaperman”), and one of the young ones blurted out that it “takes a lot of guts to quit like that.” I said, “Christ, it takes a lot of guts to stay. I can steal the kind of money they’re paying me.” I thought, filled with myself, it was a Line to Remember Hemphill By.