John Brooks; Novelist and Stock Market Writer

John Brooks, 72, an author and a staff writer for the New Yorker for four decades. A native of New York who was educated at Princeton, he served as president of the Authors Guild from 1975 to 1979. Brooks’ well-received novels included “The Big Wheel” in 1949, “A Pride of Lions” in 1954 and “The Man Who Broke Things” in 1958. But he was most highly regarded for the 10 nonfiction books he wrote between 1958 and 1981 on the foibles of the stock market and American business. Among his awards were the John Hancock Award in 1973 for the book “The Go-Go Years,” and the Loeb Magazine Award in 1964 and 1968 for New Yorker articles. Before he began writing for the New Yorker in 1949, he had been a contributing editor to Time magazine. On Tuesday in New York after a stroke.