Rod Nordland, a reporter who for four decades covered most of the world’s major wars for The New York Times and other publications, before turning his journalistic attention to his own life after a fatal cancer diagnosis, died on Wednesday at his home in Manhattan. He was 75.

The cause was glioblastoma, an aggressive brain cancer, his wife, Leila Segal, said.

In 2019, Mr. Nordland, who had been a reporter for The Times since 2009, wrote an article for the paper about the self-reflection prompted by discovering his illness. He spent his later years expanding the piece into a memoir, “Waiting for the Monsoon,” published last year.

With a toughness rooted in his wayward childhood and the brashness of a self-made man, Mr. Nordland was from an era before “journalism became a prestige career for a bunch of Ivy Leaguers,” as he wrote in his memoir.

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Mr. Nordland, left, conducts an interview in a cemetery in Syria in 2018. Credit...Mauricio Lima for The New York Times

When Mr. Nordland set out to become a reporter in the early 1970s, urban daily newspapers often had the money to support overseas bureaus, includingThe Philadelphia Inquirer, which sent him to Southeast Asia in 1979.

He did not move back to the United States for 40 years, until he was compelled to do so by his illness.

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