Jimmy Breslin, chronicler of wise guys and underdogs, dies

NEW YORK -- Author-columnist Jimmy Breslin, the Pulitzer Prize-winning chronicler of wise guys and underdogs who became the embodiment of the old-time, street-smart New Yorker, died Sunday. He was 87.

Breslin died at his Manhattan home of complications from pneumonia, his stepdaughter, Emily Eldridge, said.

Breslin was a fixture for decades in New York journalism, notably with the New York Daily News. It was Breslin, a rumpled bed of a reporter, who mounted a quixotic political campaign for citywide office in the 1960s; became the Son of Sam's regular correspondent in the '70s; exposed the city's worst corruption scandal in decades in the '80s; and was pulled from a car and stripped to his underwear by Brooklyn rioters in the '90s.

With his uncombed mop of hair and sneering Queens accent, Breslin was like a character right out of his own work -- and didn't mind telling you.

"I'm the best person ever to have a column in this business," he once boasted. "There's never been anybody in my league."

With typical disregard for authority, Breslin once took out a newspaper ad to "fire" the ABC television network when it aired his short-lived TV show in a lousy time slot. That same year, he captured the 1986 Pulitzer for commentary and the George Polk Award for metropolitan reporting. More than 20 years earlier, with Gay Talese and Tom Wolfe, Breslin had helped create "New Journalism" -- a more literary approach to news reporting.