Bruce Bliven Jr. was born on Jan. 31, 1916, in Los Angeles but moved to New York when he was 17 months old. He later said, ''Fifty-four years later, I began to write New York history to find out where I was.'' He wrote three books about the city's history and one about the whole state, ''including Buffalo,'' as he said in a remark published in ''Contemporary Authors.'' His father, a journalist, was managing editor of The New Republic. The son inherited his father's liberal stance and joined him in quitting the Descendants of the American Revolution in February 1941 after the group opposed the Lend Lease Act aiding countries fighting the Nazis. Mr. Bliven wrote briefly for a newspaper in Stroudsburg, Pa., and for The Manchester Guardian, the British paper, before graduating from Harvard in 1937. He then wrote editorials for The New York Post, leaving to serve in World War II. ''I was a lieutenant in the field artillery and took part in the D-Day landings in Normandy and wrote a children's book about it a dozen years later to find out what happened,'' he said. That book was ''The Story of D-Day, June 6, 1944'' (Random House, 1956). When he returned to civilian life, he became a magazine writer who ranged across many subjects with deep knowledge but ''did not wear it on his sleeve,'' said Philip Hamburger, another New Yorker writer. He met his wife, the former Naomi Horowitz, at The New Yorker, where she was a writer, and they had a son, Frederic. Mr. Bliven was a prolific writer of popular books and magazine articles on subjects as diverse as military campaigns and the history of the typewriter. He died on January 2, 2002, at his home in Manhattan. He was 85.