Marvin Kitman 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.
Marvin Kitman obituary
Marvin Kitman, who survived longer as a television reviewer than most of the programs he mirthfully critiqued, and who as a satirist and amateur historian audaciously, if belatedly, audited George Washington’s Revolutionary War expense account, died on Thursday at the Actors Fund Home in Englewood, N.J. He was 93.
His son, Jamie Kitman, said the cause was cancer.
Mr. Kitman joined the leftist but anti-Soviet magazine The New Leader as a TV critic in 1967, only after the magazine’s editor agreed that he could reveal in his first column that he had never regularly watched television.
He began writing a syndicated column for the Long Island daily newspaper Newsday on Dec. 7, 1969 — “a day that will live in infamy,” he said, “as far as the TV industry is concerned.”