The cause was complications from a fall, according to his son Allen Baker.

Baker was one of the best-known newspaper humorists of his time, and The Washington Post ranked his autobiography, “Growing Up,” with the most enduring recollections of American boyhood — those of James Thurber, H.L. Mencken and Mark Twain.

Baker was a police reporter, a rewrite man and a London correspondent for The Baltimore Sun, and, after 1954, a Washington correspondent for The Times.

Then, starting in 1962, he became a columnist for The Times and its news service, eventually composing nearly 5,000 “Observer” commentaries. The columns, which generated a devoted following, critical acclaim and the 1979 Pulitzer for commentary, ended with his retirement in 1998.

He was also a familiar face as the host of “Masterpiece Theater” on PBS from 1993 to 2004, having succeeded Alistair Cooke.

Baker wrote 15 books, including many collections of his columns, and “Growing Up,” a 1982 memoir of his Depression-era youth, his inspirational mother and America between the wars. It earned him his second Pulitzer, the 1983 prize for biography. Besides his two Pulitzer Prizes, he won two George Polk Awards and many other honors.

Russell Wayne Baker was born into poverty Aug. 14, 1925, in Loudoun County, Virginia. “No electricity,” he recalled. When Russell was 5, his father, Benjamin Rex Baker, a stonemason who was often out of work, drank moonshine one night, sank into a diabetic coma and died, leaving his wife and three children destitute.

Russell’s mother, Lucy Elizabeth Robinson Baker, was forced to give up an infant daughter to childless in-laws and took the boy and his younger sister to live with her brother in Newark, New Jersey. The uncle, a $35-a-week butter salesman, was the family’s only wage earner in the Depression, although Lucy Baker eventually found work as a seamstress and Russell sold magazines door to door.

When Russell was 11, the family moved to Baltimore, where he attended high school. He entered Johns Hopkins University in 1942 but left the next year to join the Navy. He took pilot training but never went abroad during World War II and left the service in 1945.

Returning to Johns Hopkins, Baker graduated with a bachelor’s degree in English in 1947 but had no real idea what to do. Then a friend who worked for The Baltimore Sun told him about a job. It was not much, but he took it: $30 a week as a night police reporter.

In the summer of 1948, he churned out a novel about a reporter in love. He had just broken up with Miriam Emily Nash, a native of Camden, New Jersey. The novel wound up in the attic, but he married Mimi, as she was called, in 1950. She died in 2015 at 88.

Baker is survived by three children, Allen, Michael and Kasia, as well as four grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. He is also survived by two sisters, Doris Groh and Mary Leslie Keech.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.