By all outward indications, Russell Baker and John Leonard should be slowing down, or at least lowering their intellectual wattage. Baker, the esteemed former two-time Pulitzer-winning columnist for the New York Times, is now 77 and probably familiar to most TV viewers as the folksy host of PBS’s Masterpiece Theatre. Leonard — from 1967 to 1982 a Times critic and then editor of the Times Book Review — is a frisky 63 (he refers to himself in print as an " old fart " ). But two new books of their essays, collected from 1997 to 2001, indicate that they remain at the top of their game. Both men embody a great tradition of literary journalism — scholarly erudition, stylistic flair, and an ability to sweep through all manner of culture high and low that recalls writers like Edmund Wilson and George Orwell. And not of least importance is their unapologetic political bias to the left.

Leonard, a former ’60s activist who likes to say that the Times hired him " directly out of the antiwar movement, " writes in an allusive style, in breathless, sometimes gargantuan sentences. He reads more like a rock critic — Lester Bangs, Robert Christgau, Greil Marcus — than some of the austere company he keeps in the New York Review of Books, the Nation, and the Times Book Review. Of course, it’s also important to remember that he writes about television (a medium he finds more " varied and interesting " than movies) for New York Magazine, and about any old thing for CBS Sunday Morning.

A typical Leonard sentence (this one on the post-cyberpunk novelist Richard Powers) reads: " On the road, the raft, on the lam — ours is the culture of Shane-like vanishing acts, an agitated itchiness from Huck Finn to the Weather Underground, with intermediate stops at the Last of the Mohicans, the Lost Generation, Dean Moriarty, Billy Pilgrim, Rabbit Angstrom, and Henderson the Rain King. " He doesn’t do a lot of stopping to explain — those long lists are the explanation, and if you don’t know anything about Doris Lessing, John Leonard is not your primer. When he turned his hand to Bob Dylan (in an essay included here), one of my younger rock-scribe pals who was trying to read it threw in the towel.

But, man, is he good. About feminist scholar Susan Faludi he writes: " There isn’t a subject she touches on — from the space program to Tailhook to Rodney King to Si Newhouse — that she doesn’t illuminate in prose as graceful as a gazelle, with statistics that startle us into sentience. " He notes Richard Powers’s " palpable yearning for the healing light of beauty and intellect. " When he cites Powers’s comment about " a perpetual, precarious, negotiated trade-off " between " the life of the private self and the life of the public hive, " he could be writing about his own work.

" There’s no drive to discover, nor passion to persuade, " Leonard wrote about the latest doings of his old employer, the Times Book Review, in his previous collection, When the Kissing Had To Stop (New Press, 1999). The passion to persuade drives every one of the 28 pieces collected in Lonesome Rangers, whether he’s extolling the virtues of Faludi, Powers, Saul Bellow, Don DeLillo, Primo Levi, Joan Baez, Mary McCarthy, or Barbara Kingsolver, expressing exasperation with an old love like Philip Roth, or telling all those New Yorker memoirists to get a life. He bonks screenwriter/memoirist Joe Eszterhas (Basic Instinct, Showgirls) for denigrating the indulgences of the ’60s counterculture with a supercilious " we " : " What do you mean, we, white man? Not, presumably, including Martin Luther King and all those gentlefolkies who sang ‘We Shall Overcome’ instead [of " Sympathy for the Devil " or " I Can’t Get No Satisfaction " ]. Nor, of course, the women, who had already begun to deconstruct themselves and hummed another tune. "

Leonard recognizes art but not art for art’s sake — he wants to know the content of these characters. And so, when Dylan turns decidedly (and arrogantly, as Leonard posits it) apolitical, he responds: " And don’t tell me it’s all about the music. . . . Caring about the music is what makes our interest in the behavior more than merely prurient. If you’d really rather not have known that Pythagoras hated beans, Spinoza loved rainbows, and Ingmar Bergman was a lousy father, you’re a better person than I am, although we both have a long way to go before we’re as good as Joan Baez. "

Leonard’s final essay, " How the Caged Bird Learns To Sing, " is part tirade, part mea culpa. It lays out all the compromises of a man who’s tried to say what he thinks, going against the grain of the Big Media that have long paid him well. Its centerpiece is a tale about his own attempts, as Times Book Review editor, to get a colleague’s book published, and the Devil’s deal he makes with Ben Bradlee. Journalism students should be required to take turns reading it aloud in class in its entirety.

IF LEONARD is the literary essayist’s equivalent of bebop — towering vertical forms of allusive harmonies and adjacent chords, speed-of-light tempos, and neck-snapping, sarcastic offbeats — then Russell Baker is swing, linear narrative melodies with a dry irony that lags slightly behind the beat. After 36 years of 750-word twice-weekly " Observer " columns for the Times, he relishes the 4000-word strolls afforded him by the New York Review of Books, where all these pieces first appeared.

Think of Looking Back as the third installment of Baker’s memoirs (following 1982’s Growing Up and 1989’s The Good Times), since he says in his introduction that the books he chose to review afforded him yet another angle on his own past. Whether the subject is William Randolph Hearst, Lyndon Johnson, the civil-rights movement, the death penalty, or Joe DiMaggio, he slices through volumes of complex material with the deceptive ease of someone who’s lived through the events he’s describing, for whom the material at hand is simply a memory freshener, and whose skills as a writer have never been better.

When he reviews a book about the feud between Lyndon Johnson and Bobby Kennedy, Baker sets the scene with an anecdote about the time when, as a " nameless face in the press gallery, " he interviewed the then vice-president. Johnson is all high-energy flourish, " torrents of words " pouring out of him. " In the middle of the monologue, he surreptitiously, without interrupting the word flow, sent a note out to his secretary asking, ‘Who is this I’m talking to?’  " The story beautifully establishes the Johnson character, and it introduces Baker’s subtle analysis of the Johnson/Kennedy relationship.

For Baker, paraphrase is an art. He re-creates the narratives under review, compressing, slyly giving his own slant on events. Of David Nasaw’s biography of Hearst he writes: " Now he is a newspaper publisher, now a movie producer, now a lover of women, now a left-wing radical, now a right-wing reactionary, stage-door Johnny, Red hunter, compulsive buyer of things, things, things. " It does swing. Somewhere Lester Young is tapping a slippered foot and murmuring, " Tell the story. "

Story is almost everything for Baker. " Not since Tahara, Boy King of the Yucatan has a book so delighted my inner boy, " he writes of the Hearst biography. Of Marguerite Young and her sprawling, overstuffed, unfinished, impossible biography of labor hero Eugene Debs, Harp Song for a Radical, he says: " She simply can’t resist stopping everything to tell a good story, regardless of its pertinence. As a result, you gradually become so engrossed in her stories that you cease caring about her argument, or whether she is even making an argument. "

But flowing beneath the warmth and good humor of all those Baker stories is a cool, abiding undercurrent of serious concerns that are at the root of Leonard’s work as well: the dissolution of the American left, the debasement of American political rhetoric, and America’s unabated obsession with the individual pursuit of money to the exclusion of social and economic justice. Reviewing the work of journalist Murray Kempton, Baker traces the evolution of the American left to " liberalism, " the dirty " L-word " of American politics jumped on by demagogues, and concludes, " The spreading inanity found President Clinton in 1996 coming out firmly against smoking by children. " In a piece about the right wing he reminds us, " Racism has always been the unmentionable guest at conservatism’s table. " Since Young never finished Debs’s biography, Baker finishes it for us, reminding us that Debs almost died in prison simply for speaking out against America’s involvement in World War I (a violation of the Espionage Act). This wasn’t some fluke miscarriage of justice but a matter of policy that was pursued with vehemence by President Wilson. And Baker also reminds us that in 1904, Debs’s " crackpot " Socialist political platform called for " minimum wages, a maximum on work hours, women’s suffrage, and abolition of child labor. "

IT WAS LEONARD who once wrote, " Longtime readers know that a Baker column, like a story by Cheever or Gogol, can turn on them and bite. " Both writers came up as wunderkinder (Baker a White House correspondent at the age of 29, Leonard a Times staff book reviewer at 33.) Baker likes words like " malarkey " and " ballyhoo, bushwash, and baloney. " Leonard likes to come up with descriptive neologisms like " cult studs, " " Khmer Newts, " and " Langley spooks. " Baker is the good Times man, Leonard the perennial malcontent, long-term employable despite himself. Leonard makes his argument with exhausting erudition and dexterous verbal clamor; Baker persuades with the sure-footed grace of his storytelling.

Both men write about the New Yorker, and about Young’s Debs biography. Leonard cites Young for specific factual errors whereas Baker is content to point out, " This is not a book for those needing facts they can take into court. " Leonard says flat out that Robert F. Kennedy " was the last American politician I cared about or cried for. " Baker takes us through the grand, tragic story of Eugene Debs’s life, the great ideas and ideologies, into Debs’s maximum-security prison cell, where, " frail and ailing, " the labor leader and presidential candidate is serving a 10-year sentence of hard time, and leaves us with the simple human fact uttered by Attorney General Harry Daugherty in advising President Harding to commute his sentence: " I never met a man I liked better. "

Both styles persuade with their passion and sense of discovery. Both writers are essential.