NEW YORK, NY.- Evan Wright, an award-winning journalist whose reporting from the Iraq War formed the bestselling book “Generation Kill” and whose work illuminated the lives of those on the fringes of society, died on Friday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 59.

His death was ruled a suicide by the Los Angeles County medical examiner’s office and was confirmed in a statement released Monday night by his family.

Wright was known for his immersive journalism that often focused on subjects outside mainstream media coverage, including traveling with anarchists behind the Battle of Seattle in 1999, covering the 1996 Aryan Nations World Congress and riding with the Marines leading the United States’ invasion of Iraq. His reporting on crime, war and American subcultures was published in Rolling Stone, where he was a contributing editor, as well as in Hustler, Vanity Fair and Time.

“I failed at everything else,” he told The Cleveland Plain Dealer in 2011, discussing what led him to journalism. “I was optimistic. It was a refuge for rogues and miscreants.”

Wright moved from his native Ohio to Los Angeles in the early 1990s to pursue screenwriting. He landed his first paid journalism job in 1995 as an entertainment editor at Hustler, reviewing pornographic films and covering the adult film industry.

At Rolling Stone, Wright was introduced to combat and military culture, first on assignment in Afghanistan in 2002 embedding with the Army’s 101st Airborne Division, and then in 2003 with the Marines’ 1st Reconnaissance Battalion in Iraq. Wright secured a spot in the lead vehicle in the push from Kuwait to Baghdad, eventually filing a three-part series in Rolling Stone called “The Killer Elite,” which received the 2004 National Magazine Award for excellence in reporting.

He built off the series for his bestselling book “Generation Kill,” a nuanced look at the young Marines in Iraq whom he called members of the “disposable generation” — coming from broken homes, raised on video games and the internet, and trained as killers. He was fascinated by what the platoon “thought of the world when they weren’t shooting their guns,” he told The New York Times in 2004, when the book was published.

“The young combat troops I reported on in the Middle East represented a new kind of subculture, one that was often as misunderstood by civilians at home as it was by military leaders,” Wright wrote in the introduction to his 2009 book “Hella Nation.”

Grounded in details about the Marines and the gallows humor of war, “Generation Kill” was later adapted into an HBO miniseries that Wright co-wrote with David Simon and Ed Burns, the team behind “The Wire.”

Wright continued writing books and for television. “Hella Nation” was a collection of his articles that appeared in various publications examining the lives of “rejectionists” — people who decidedly had opted out of dominant culture, he said.

“He had this endless empathy, and things that would horrify most people fascinated him,” said Will Dana, a former managing editor at Rolling Stone who worked closely with Wright.

His other books include “How to Get Away With Murder in America,” about a CIA paramilitary officer and Blackwater executive alleged to have had early career ties to organized crime in Miami, and “American Desperado,” about the life and career of cocaine smuggler Jon Roberts, who co-wrote the book.

Wright was a showrunner on the 2016 miniseries “Harley and the Davidsons” about the motorcycle company. His television credits include “Homeland,” “Homecoming,” “The Bridge,” “The Man in the High Castle” and “Dirty John.”

In a post on social media last week, Wright said he had begun working on a book in 1982 about his childhood in a government-run youth rehabilitation center. He was featured in a documentary called “Teen Torture Inc.,” a three-part docuseries on HBO Max about such institutions, released the day before his death.

Evan Wright was born on Dec. 12, 1964, in Cleveland. He graduated from Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, with a degree in medieval and renaissance studies.

Wright is survived by his wife, Kelli Wright, and three young children, Carter, Evan, and Kennedy; a sister, Nora; and a brother, Walter.

Wright said his goal as a reporter was to see things as they are and inhabit the worlds of those in his stories.

“It’s a powerful experience to merge with somebody,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 2009.

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If you are having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.