Sir Harold Evans, the charismatic publisher, author and muckraker who was a bold-faced name for decades for exposing wrongdoing in 1960s London to publishing 1990s best-sellers such as Primary Colors, has died, his wife said on Thursday. He was 92.

His wife, fellow author-publisher Tina Brown, said he died on Wednesday in New York from congestive heart failure.

Evans was a high-profile go-getter, starting in the 1960s as an editor of the Northern Echo and The Sunday Times of London and continuing into the 1990s as president of Random House.

A defender of print journalism well into the digital age, Evans was one of the all-time newspaper editors, startling British society with revelations of espionage, corporate wrongdoing and government scandal.

In the US, he published the mysterious political novel Primary Colors and memoirs by Manuel Noriega and Marlon Brando.

More recently, he served as a contributing editor to US News and editor-at-large for The Week. In 2011, he became an editor-at-large for Reuters.

He held his own, but was mindful of his working-class background – a locomotive driver’s son, born in Lancashire, English, on June 28, 1928.