ALBANY — Journalist, author, advocate and longtime Capital Region resident Scott Christianson, whose diverse subjects ranged from the history of incarceration to runaway slaves, died suddenly on Sunday at his home in Great Barrington, Mass.

Christianson, 69, died from massive head trauma after falling down the back stairs of his home. His wife, Tamar Gordon, said the banister had given way.

Gordon described her husband as a man who combined a voracious curiosity with a deep sense of social justice — and a keen nose for a great story.

Christianson had recently begun working for the investigative unit of the McClatchy news service. Just two weeks ago, he and his McClatchy colleague Greg Gordon published a comprehensive investigation on the ties between President Donald Trump and the hedge-fund mogul Robert Mercer.

Gordon laughed as she recalled hearing him lustily discuss his next story over the speakerphone only last week.

"He loved to write, and he loved investigations," Gordon said.

A 1965 graduate of Bethlehem Central High School who last year was inducted into its hall of fame, Christianson began his career at the Bethlehem Star and the Knickerbocker News, which merged with the Times Union in 1988. Despite his relative youth, Christianson's work at the Knick News from 1969 to 1972 saw him nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and profiled as "one of the nation's top 20 investigative reporters," according to his BCHS bio.

He would go on to contribute articles to dozens of publications, from The New Yorker and The New York Times to the Washington Post and The Nation. He also worked on documentary films and curated exhibits on crime and punishment.

Christianson made the leap into public service in the 1980s, serving as an adviser on criminal justice and correctional issues to Gov. Mario Cuomo. He later held leadership roles at the state Coalition for Criminal Justice, the Safer Society Foundation and the Center on Minorities and Criminal Justice.

Gordon met Christianson in 1989, when they were set up on a date in Troy by a mutual friend. She had just completed a teaching post at Great Meadow Correctional Facility in Washington County. Hearing this, Christianson noted that the prison had once contained a soap factory where convicts, stripped to the waist, would sing work songs.

"This man is a storyteller," she recalled thinking.

"Scott and I knew immediately that we were going to be together," Gordon said.

Christianson wrote more than 10 works of nonfiction, including "With Liberty for Some: 500 Years of Imprisonment in America,'' which in 1999 received Distinguished Honors in the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award competition.

In 1999, Christianson told the Times Union the study was his attempt ''to explore, from the very beginning, the origins and development of prisons in America to show how much of a part of our heritage it is, and how much of a role it's played in our history, to help explain why to this day we imprison more people than any other country on the face of the Earth.

''We're really a nation of prisoners and keepers,'' he said.

America's tragic racial legacy was also the subject of Christianson's 2010 book "Freeing Charles: The Struggle to Free a Slave on the Eve of the Civil War."

His interest in the life of Charles Nalle, Troy's most famous fugitive slave, began in 1991 when he moved into a house in Sand Lake that was used as a stop on the Underground Railroad. Nalle was arrested in 1860 in Troy under the Fugitive Slave Act. Lawyer Horace F. Averill (for whom Averill Park is named) alerted authorities that Nalle had escaped from a Virginia plantation two years earlier.

Christianson's other books include "Condemned: Inside the Sing-Sing Death House," "Innocent: Inside Wrongful Conviction Cases," "The Last Gasp: The Rise and Fall of the American Gas Chamber" and "Bodies of Evidence: Forensic Science and Crime."

His most recent book was 2015's "100 Documents That Changed the World: From the Magna Carta to Wikileaks."

A longtime Sand Lake resident, Christianson taught regionally at the University at Albany, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Union College.

Gordon said her husband's most recent book project looked at the opioid crisis and the contributing role played by drug companies.

"He was going to blow the lid off of all of them," she said.

In addition to his wife, Christianson is survived by his three children and a grandson.

Funeral services will be held at Finnerty and Stevens in Great Barrington at 1 p.m. Wednesday. Read the full obituary here.