Jimmy Breslin's influence on the current generation of New York City columnists is as pronounced as was Ernest Hemingway's on Breslin's generation. In any city newspaper--especially the tabloids--one finds echoes of Breslin's spare, muscular prose, vibrant with machismo yet suffused with tenderness, full of irony and humor yet bridling with outrage, fiercely proletarian yet decidedly literary. That is Breslin's legacy some thirty years after reviving Roaring Twenties newspaper prose and emerging as a progenitor of the "New Journalism" at the ill-fated New York Herald Tribune.

Breslin's style, which combines old-fashioned street reporting with the vernacular of the city's working class, is distinct, but rather than an inventor of a new journalism he is more properly seen--as he himself has declared--as the reviver of an older journalistic tradition, albeit one to which he has brought a modern sensibility.

Despite the fact that Breslin worked alongside many in the vanguard...