A longtime reporter and editor for The Boston Globe, Martin F. Nolan has covered American politics with a distinctive style that deployed allusions from Shakespeare to baseball.
In 1971, he began a year-end tradition of recalling the year's notable obituaries, an “Auld Lang Syne” feature widely copied by other newspapers and magazines.
While off-duty, he reported for the Globe on a free-lance basis, interviewing Richard Nixon, Robert Kennedy, Barry Goldwater and Nelson Rockefeller.
Overseas, he interviewed Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin, Palestinian leader Yassir Arafat and politicians in Ireland and the United Kingdom.
After he became the Globe's Washington bureau chief in 1969, he won approval from his peers, including John Chancellor and Walter Mears, co-authors of The News Business.
[5] In Boys on the Bus, a 1973 book on campaign journalism, the author, Timothy Crouse, described him as the following:[6] "Nolan, a witty man in his middle 30s, had the unshaven, slack-jawed, nuts-to-you-too look of a bartender in a sailors’ cafe.
"[7] He compared George Meany the AFL-CIO boss to Shakespeare's King Lear, "A cigar stub as his orb and a plumber's wrench as his scepter.... presiding over the final hours of labor's dominance in Democratic Party politics.
"[8] Reporting from Portland, OR after a volcano eruption, he wrote: "Church services were canceled Sunday in reluctant homage to Mount St, Helens.
If clergymen needed an Old Testament text, they could have chosen Genesis 18:27 in which Abraham argues with the Lord to spare cities, noting that he is still ‘but dust and ashes.’”[9] In 1973, Nolan was elected to Washington’s Gridiron Club, devoted to an elite annual white-tie dinner “roasting” politicians.
In 1986, he helped the Globe recruit writers for a special edition for the World Series: Doris Kearns Goodwin, David Halberstam, Stephen King, John Updike and George Will.
In the age of Tris Speaker and Babe Ruth, the era of Jimmie Foxx and Ted Williams, through the empty-seats epoch of Don Buddin and Willie Tasby and unto the decades of Carl Yastrzemski and Jim Rice, the ballpark is the star.
A crazy-quilt violation of city planning principles, an irregular pile of architecture, a menace to marketing consultants, Fenway Park works.
“The Fenway Century,” printed in the ballpark's official tour book, concludes that: "For ten dynamic decades, a prosaic pile of bricks assembled in a reclaimed swamp has housed the passionate poetry of hope.
Boston Magazine profiled a reporter "whose curiosity, skill and spirit combine to catch the essence of the town....it is hard to be iconoclastic in an age without idols, but Marty Nolan comes close.
"[15] After a fellowship at Stanford's Hoover Institution, Nolan returned to California in 1995 to become the Globe's West Coast correspondent, writing news stories and columns until 2001, when he retired.