Prodded by Oliver Sacks, he wrote a humane, award-winning book about the condition. A music maven, he also wrote liner notes for the Grateful Dead and his friend David Crosby.
Steve Silberman, a science journalist whose award-winning book about the history of autism helped broaden the public’s understanding of that often-misunderstood condition and those diagnosed with it, died on Aug. 29 at his home in San Francisco. He was 66.
His husband, Keith Karraker, said the cause was most likely a heart attack.
In 2000, Mr. Silberman, who was then a contributing editor at Wired magazine, knew little about autism beyond Dustin Hoffman’s Oscar-winning performance as Raymond Babbitt, a man with the condition, in the 1988 film “Rain Man.”
“At that point, like most of the world, I believed that autism was this extremely rare neurological syndrome,” Mr. Silberman said in a 2015 interview with “The Book Review,” a New York Times podcast.
He was surprised when two different people he was planning to interview at their homes told him, almost as a warning, that they had autistic daughters. He thought the comments were an odd coincidence, but when he recounted them to a friend at a cafe, a woman nearby overheard him. She told Mr. Silberman that she was a special education teacher in Silicon Valley and that there was “an epidemic of autism” in that area.
“Something terrible is happening to our children,” she said.
The ominous tone of these exchanges, not unusual for the time, captured his attention.
“I got a chill,” Mr. Silberman recalled, and “because I’m a reporter, I got the desire to do some reporting.”