Kitman was the author of nine books, including two on George Washington that combine humor with extensive historical research.
[1] He lived across the street from novelist Robert Ludlum, then working on the first in a long list of thrillers, the sight of which Kitman later said inspired him to get serious about his own writing.
[1][14] The cleverness of these efforts led to Paul Krassner hiring him to write satirical consumer advocacy for The Realist, which included pieces that took television commercials literally or imagined sardonic extremes of Cold War preparedness.
[1] Kitman was one of Monocle editors who created the idea of the Report from Iron Mountain satirical hoax, which was written and published by Leonard Lewin in 1967 and subsequently believed as true by many.
[1] Taking on politics, Kitman staged a mock run in the 1964 United States presidential election, entering the New Hampshire primary for the Republican Party.
"[13] 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.
[1] He then started his run at Newsday on December 7, 1969[2] ("A day that will live in infamy, as far as the TV industry is concerned," Kitman remarked,[12] while Bill Moyers, publisher of the paper, later said: "I hired Marvin because we needed his wit, without which a media critic is a warrior without a sword.
[17] Kitman worked from his home in Leonia the entire time, avoiding the commute to Melville, New York, where the paper was published,[5] and in the earlier years sometimes using couriers to carry videotapes and copy back and forth.
When the time came for the column to end, Kitman said in typical fashion, "Newsday gave me a tryout, and after 35 years we decided it wasn't working out.
[3] Regarding the premiere of the sixth season of Saturday Night Live in 1980, the first with none of the original cast, he called it "offensive and raunchy" without being funny.
"[5] 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.
"[3] In any case, Kitman recognized that by and after the end of his tenure at Newsday, there was a wave of quality series on television, which he claimed a connection to: "I take credit for [today's better programming] because I used to say cable was the answer.
"[5] In retrospect, Kitman has identified the 1980s series Hill Street Blues as a turning point in American broadcast television quality, although not fully capitalized on at the time.
'"[5] Kitman wrote two books about George Washington that combined humor with extensive historical research.
Brent Tarter, a public historian in Virginia, wrote that the first was "temporarily amusing but highly perishable" while the second was "sometimes carelessly and sometimes even deliberately contemptuous of evidence; it destroys Kitman's credibility with serious readers.
Whatever useful he might have to say is impeached by his over-clever prose and his twisting of facts and misrepresentation of historical context in order to make puns, draw irrelevant parallels, and otherwise write in [a] flip and entertaining style ..."[33] 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.
[29] But historian of Virginia William H. Stauffer found the same work "informative" and "praiseworthy" for the full light it shed on Washington's character.
[27] Art historian and Washington iconographer Karal Ann Marling said that while The Making of the Prefident 1789 maintained an "air of pie-in-the-face irreverence," Kitman had demonstrated that he could "moonlight in the library with the best of 'em.
"[34] 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.
[36] Titled The Man Who Would Not Shut Up, it was based upon 29 interviews Kitman conducted with the subject as well as large amounts of research.
[38] 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".