L. J. Davis, a journalist and novelist who wrote about money and business, real estate and home renovation, the Industrial Revolution and his beloved Brooklyn, often with wry or sardonic humor, was found dead in his Brooklyn home on Wednesday. He was 70.

Judith Rascoe, a friend, confirmed the death. The cause had not yet been determined, she said.

A prolific magazine journalist who wrote largely about business for Harper’s, where he was a contributing editor, The New York Times Magazine, New York and The New Republic, among other publications, Mr. Davis was the author of four nonfiction books. “Bad Money” (1982) traced the stories of several business calamities; “Onassis: Aristotle and Christina” (1986), was partly a family biography and partly a business story about the Greek shipping magnate and his daughter; “The Billionaire Shell Game” (1998) took a critical look at the evolution of cable television; and “Fleet Fire: Thomas Edison and the Pioneers of the Electric Revolution” (2003) chronicled the harnessing of electricity, the first of a planned series of books about the Industrial Revolution.

Mr. Davis also wrote four novels that even he acknowledged were obscure. One, however, “A Meaningful Life,” originally published in 1971, was praised a few years ago in an essay by a younger Brooklyn novelist, Jonathan Lethem, and the attention led to its being reissued, to modest acclaim, in 2009.

The novel, a dark comedy, concerns a young man, much like Mr. Davis himself, who has come to Manhattan from Boise, Idaho, via Stanford University, and who, suffering an existential crisis, gives up his respectable, stultifying Manhattan life, buys a rundown house in a rundown Brooklyn neighborhood and begins anew as an urban pioneer.