Philip Fradkin | Writer of the West, 77

Late in life he wrote Wallace Stegner and the American West, a well-received biography of perhaps the region's most acclaimed writer. Forrest G. Robinson, a professor of history at the University of California, Santa Cruz, said the biography was "the best full account of Stegner's life we have."

Philip Lawrence Fradkin grew up in Montclair, N.J.

He eventually made his way westward, working for small newspapers in California in the early 1960s before being hired by the Los Angeles Times in 1964. He shared in a Pulitzer Prize the paper received in 1966 for its coverage of the Watts riots. He later covered the Vietnam War and, in 1970, created an environmental beat at the paper. He left in 1975 - he said his editor had told him his articles were tilting toward environmentalism - and became an environmental-policy expert in the administration of Gov. Jerry Brown.

He announced his retirement from writing after the publication, in 2011, of his biography of Everett Ruess, a young artist, writer, and wanderer who became something of a mythical figure after he disappeared in the Utah canyon lands in 1934.

- N.Y. Times News Service