OBIT: Fiddler On the Roof Author Dead at 98

Joseph Stein, the playwright best known for turning Fiddler On the Roof from a Yiddish short story into a Broadway musical, has died at the age of 98. The Tony Award-winning writer supplied the story for almost a dozen more musicals, including Zorba and Take Me Along, in a career that began in 1948 and lasted well into his '90s, AP reports.

Stein, born in the Bronx in 1912, died in Manhattan's Mount Sinai Medical Center after fracturing his skull in a fall. The playwright had suffered numerous ailments, including prostate cancer in recent years, and used them all as fodder for humor, said his son. "He said he got some of his best material on the way to the grave," Harry Stein tells the New York Times.