For a certain kind of New Yorker — an aficionado of the mid-20th-century cultural firmament, a sucker for eccentrics, big lives, mob bosses, criminal trials and especially poetic denunciations of hypocrisy, false piety and artifice of any kind — it has been a slog waiting around for the compiled works of Murray Kempton.

Politically nimble and morally steadfast, Kempton produced 11,000 newspaper columns read by highbrows and lowlifes, from the 1940s through the 1990s, in the process winning a Pulitzer Prize, two George Polk Awards, a National Book Award and, perhaps most enviably, a Grammy for liner notes accompanying a Frank Sinatra album.

“Going Around,” assembled by a young writer named Andrew Holter, arrives now, delivering more than 400 pages of Kempton’s journalism — dozens of pieces from his years at The New York Post and Newsday, his dalliance with The New Republic and his long tenure as a contributor to The New York Review of Books.

Though they were very different platforms — a term he would have surely detested, given his aversions to jargon, cliché and even modern usage itself — he did not recalibrate to fit any single institutional tone. The tabloid reader commuting home on the No. 4 train was given the same all-access pass to his protean intellect and lyrical, digressive sentences as the Park Avenue neighbor of William F. Buckley’s reading him, fireside, in the more rarefied outlets.

Buckley was a fan of Kempton’s. So, too, were Langston Hughes, Richard Nixon and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Kempton brought his erudition with him wherever he went, and he went everywhere — throughout the South covering the civil rights movement in the 1950s and ’60s; to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968, where he was arrested; to every corner of New York City, mostly traveling by bicycle and dressed always as if he were on his way to a christening or a deposition.