During his time at �鶹��ý����, Leon reported on the college sports teams, serving two years as sports editor for The Montclarion and eventually worked as the sports editor for La Campana, the yearbook.

Leon J. Zimmerman with his yearbook opened to his yearbook portrait.

Upon graduation, he continued his quest for journalism by attending graduate school, majoring in Journalism at Penn State University. Having no undergraduate journalism coursework, he was accepted as a “special student” with the requirement of completing 18 credits of undergraduate journalism courses before full acceptance.

After completing a semester of journalism classes, he searched for a role in sports journalism. While he did not get a job as a sports writer, he accepted a position as a regional news reporter for the newspaper known as The Bergen Record, getting his foot in the door. For more than a decade of writing, he moved on to roles covering the county courthouse, the state house bureau in Trenton, and becoming politics editor. Covering politics and government, Leon covered the 1967 USA-Soviet Union Summit Conference in Glassboro State College, the New Hampshire primary and the Republican National Presidential Convention in Miami in 1968, as well as Presidents, Senators, Members of Congress and New Jersey state legislators.

But this leads to the most important question. Did Leon ever fall into his original passion of sports journalism? You now have the chance to find out! Leon visited �鶹��ý����, nearly 70 years after graduation, on February 12, 2026 and donated a copy of his book which can be found in Sprague Library for your reading pleasure.

In September 2024, English professor invited Zimmerman back to campus to share his experiences as an English major and how the major shaped his future. During his most recent visit to campus in February, Zimmerman also gave a copy of Bylines to Story Lines to Professor Gonzalez, who was surprised to find that Leon also included a note about the September 2024 visit in his collection.

His book can also be ! You can read the synopsis here:

“This is a memoir that tells the stories behind the stories that the author wrote during his career as a newspaper reporter and columnist, and later as a public relations consultant and lobbyist. It covers the eventful years of the Sixties and beyond in New Jersey and national politics and includes a surprising cast of the famous and forgotten. Replete with newspaper clippings and photographs, this book offers the reader an interesting glance at moments in history and an impressive career. Organized in easy to digest chunks, Bylines is an easy and pleasant read, as told by an award-winning writer.”

Read the original news item on the Sprague Library’s news feed. 

The novel tells the story of an African American expatriate, Simeon Brown, who initially finds his life in the early 1960s Paris to be a welcoming color-blind idyll after experiencing racial violence in the U.S. In trying to reconcile the positive experience of African American expatriates in France with Algerian oppression, Simeon finds himself considered White by perceived privilege, if not by skin color, and therefore complicit in French racism toward Algerians. He begins to lose his previously utopian outlook after he embarks on a journey to find out more about the Algerian War. The novel culminates in an account of the massacre of Algerian protesters by Parisian police on October 17, 1961. Of all the African American expatriate writers who lived in France in the 1960s, Smith alone actively opposed the French treatment of Algerians. Although it appears in a novel, the documentation in The Stone Face remains perhaps the most influential eyewitness account of the 1961 Paris massacre.

Dr. Matthew edited and . In addition to editing both novels, Matthew wrote introductions, short essays discussing themes related to each novel, and annotated “for further exploration” bibliographies. She also selected illustrations.

Friday, September 19, 11-12:15 p.m.
Panel: Autotheory and Memoir