Joseph Stein, the Tony Award-winning author of “Fiddler on the Roof” and more than a dozen other Broadway musicals, died on Sunday in Manhattan. He was 98.

He died after fracturing his skull in a fall, his son Harry said, adding that his father, an inveterate jokester, had suffered numerous ailments in recent years, including prostate cancer, and used all of them as fodder for humor.

“He said he got some of his best material on the way to the grave,” Harry Stein said.

“Fiddler on the Roof,” based on Sholem Aleichem’s short stories about a Jewish milkman and his family who face terrifying change in a small Russian village in 1905, opened on Broadway in 1964. Sheldon Harnick’s lyrics and Jerry Bock’s score captured the high notes of the praise, but Mr. Stein’s book hardly went unnoticed.

“It goes beyond local color and lays bare in quick, moving strokes the sorrow of a people,” Howard Taubman wrote in his review in The New York Times, which also described the book as “marvelously right.”