Theodore Taylor, who died Thursday at 85, was a prolific author of children’s books, including “The Cay,” a dramatic tale of interracial understanding that became required reading in schools in dozens of states.

Mining a wealth of experience from a career that included stints as a journalist, a Hollywood screenwriter and publicist, and a steamship public information officer, Taylor wrote books — both fiction and nonfiction — about nuclear weapons, the Arctic, famous naval battles, and Revolutionary War history.

“Lacking a good imagination, certainly unable to write science fiction, I must rely on personal experience, research and real characters to deliver my stories,” he told the Virginian-Pilot of Norwalk, Va., in 2005.

“The Cay” (1969) tells the story of an 11-year-old white boy and an elderly black sailor who are marooned together on a Caribbean desert island during World War II after their ship is torpedoed by a German submarine. The boy loses first his eyesight and then his racist attitudes, and the sailor eventually gives his life to save the boy.

The book was instantly popular and eventually sold more than 4 million copies while becoming widely assigned classroom reading. It also served as a lightning rod for the culture wars of the 1970s, with critics saying the sailor was a superstitious, subservient stereotype who spoke in comical Creole dialect. In 1975, Taylor was asked to return the Jane Addams Children’s Book Award from the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. He complied, but insisted that “The Cay” was “a subtle plea for better race relations and more understanding.” The book is still in print.

Taylor said he got the idea for the story from a news item about a boy in a life raft who disappeared after his ship was torpedoed by a German submarine. The sailor he based on an actual person. “Would the critics have had him speak Brooklynese instead of Creole?” Taylor thundered. “Nonsense.”

Also based on Taylor’s actual experiences was “The Bomb” (1995), a novel about the inhabitants of the Bikini Atoll, who were displaced by American nuclear tests in 1946. Taylor, who served as a lieutenant in the Merchant Marine during World War II, had been a member of Operation Crossroads, the Navy’s bomb testing operation.

Taylor was born in rural North Carolina. His family was poor, and he spent lots of time outdoors, sometimes fishing with his father at the Hatteras Banks, a location that would become the backdrop to his “Cape Hatteras Trilogy” of novels for young adults (1974-77).

He got his first job at age 13, writing a column on high school sports for the local newspaper for 50 cents a week. After leaving high school, Taylor took various sports writing jobs and ended up as a scriptwriter for the sportscaster Bill Stern.

After serving in the Merchant Marine and then in the Navy during the Korean War, Taylor produced “The Magnificent Mitscher” (1954), the biography of a World War II aircraft carrier group commander. He wrote several more nonfiction books for adults, including “The Amazing World of Kreskin” (1973), “Jule: The Story of Composer Jule Styne” (1978), and “The Cats of Shambala” (1985), written with the actress Tippi Hedren.

Taylor also worked occasionally as a television screenwriter and is listed as a production coordinator for the film “Tora! Tora! Tora!” (1970), an experience he described as “draining and disastrous.” In 2003, his children’s novel “The Maldonado Miracle” was filmed for Showtime, starring Peter Fonda and directed by Salma Hayek.

But it was as a children’s author, after 1969, that he found his true métier, and here he was prolific, writing nearly three dozen fiction and nonfiction titles.

“The Cay” was made into a 1974 TV film starring James Earl Jones. Taylor later wrote what he called a “prequel-sequel” that followed the boy’s life before and after his encounter with the sailor. “Timothy of the Cay” (1993) was well received; Publishers Weekly called it “somewhat more thoughtful than its well-loved antecedent.”

Taylor was a two-fingered typist who once wrote a book-length autobiographical ode to his manual Olympia upright, “Making Love to Typewriters” (2004). He wrote daily into his 80s at his Laguna Beach, Calif., home. He continued to get mail from young readers of “The Cay,” and he said in interviews that the book was his favorite.

“During the school year, I receive up to 600 letters a week and employ a secretary full time to answer them,” Taylor told Contemporary Authors. “No writer can be more proud of a single book than I am.”