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By merrily using fiction to dissect itself, he was at the vanguard of a movement that defined a postwar American style.

His sprawling and boisterous novel “The Sot-Weed Factor,” published in 1960, projected him into the ranks of the country’s most innovative writers.

He won a National Book Award for “Spartina,” beating out novels by Amy Tan and E.L. Doctorow. A longtime professor, he lived for a time without electricity on an island.

John D. MacDonald was eerily prescient about the risks of human-driven climate disasters in the region.

A longtime columnist for The Washington Post, he also wrote dozens of books about basketball, baseball, tennis, football and the Olympics.

Writing for anglers and amateurs alike, he found that the sport can reveal as much about people as it does about fish.

His clever, melancholic mind produced some of the most enduring heroes in spy fiction. Here are his best books.

The drama, which has had two runs in Britain, won London’s Olivier Award for best new play earlier this year.

Black Sparrow Press, a shoestring operation he ran out of his home, became one of the highest-profile small publishers in the U.S., championing writers like Charles Bukowski.

After decamping from New York to New Mexico, he wrote what was, for a time, among the most widely read novels about Latinos.