His death was announced by the New York radio station WABC, where he attracted his biggest audiences.

Mr. Grant thrived on the radio despite being boycotted for racist remarks, and despite a trademark habit of hanging up on his own callers.

But his sharp tongue also proved his undoing. In 1996, WABC fired him over a remark he made after news reports said a plane carrying Ronald H. Brown, the commerce secretary in the Clinton administration, had crashed in Croatia. In a comment on the air following the news bulletin, Mr. Grant seemed to express the hope that Mr. Brown, an African-American and a perennial target of his scorn, had not survived. All 35 people aboard the plane were killed.

Mr. Grant had hosted radio and television talks shows in Los Angeles when he arrived in New York in 1970 to work at WMCA, a major radio station in the region. He left WMCA for another competitor, WOR, in a contract dispute shortly afterward and joined WABC in 1984.

By then his arch disdain for liberals, prominent black people, welfare recipients, feminists, gay people and anyone who disagreed with him was familiar to his listeners. The white supremacist David Duke had been a frequent guest on his show in the 1970s.

In 1986, Mr. Grant conducted the first live radio interview with Bernard Goetz, the white vigilante who shot and wounded four black youths on a subway train. Congratulating Mr. Goetz, who said the youths had harassed him and were getting ready to rob him, Mr. Grant lamented only that he had not "finished the job by killing them all."

Mr. Grant was among the first radio hosts to take full advantage of the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987; as part of the Reagan administration's drive for large-scale federal deregulation, the repeal essentially freed broadcasters to vent political views without having to present opposing perspectives.

He became openly partisan, friendly to Republicans like Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and Gov. George E. Pataki and hostile to Democrats like Gov. Mario M. Cuomo (whom he called "Il Duce") and Senator Frank R. Lautenberg ("Senator Loussenberg"). He also became less constrained in talking about race.

"You can talk all you want about 'minorities' rights,' but heaven forbid you talk about white rights," he said on WABC in 1989. "I see a very bleak future for this country, simply because the quality of the citizenry seems to be heading down."

The country was being overrun, he said in 1991, by "millions of subhumanoids, savages, who really would feel more at home careening along the sands of the Kalahari or the dry deserts of eastern Kenya."

Civil rights leaders and media watchdog groups complained about Mr. Grant, but the attention seemed only to enlarge his political influence. His studio was a must-stop for candidates for Congress, mayor and governor. Mr. Giuliani and Mr. Pataki each publicly thanked him for his support after winning their first elections to high office, saying they would not have won without it.

Part of Mr. Grant's appeal was a Dirty Harry persona, expressed in outbursts of impatience with callers. He dispatched them profligately — sometimes for disagreeing with him, sometimes for agreeing too obsequiously, and sometimes, it seemed, just because he could. "Get off my phone, you creep!" was his signature shout.

Off the air Mr. Grant was courtly and polite; on the air, he articulated the frustrations of "the working stiff — the guy who pays $4 a day in bridge tolls just to go to and from work," the WABC program director Mark Mason said in 1988.

Fans said Mr. Grant hated and baited everyone, noting that he also railed against "subhumanoid" whites. He was like a pro wrestler, they said — all bluster and choreography.

But Michael Harrison, founder of the talk radio monthly and online journal Talkers, said Mr. Grant believed every word he said — though like any performer, he added, Mr. Grant had created a persona as a vehicle for his views.