Jeffrey Zaslow, a columnist and best-selling author whose books included chronicles of a dying professor’s last lecture, a pilot who landed a crippled commuter plane in the Hudson River and Rep. Gabrielle Giffords’ recovery from wounds in a horrific shooting in Arizona, died Friday in a car accident in northern Michigan. He was 53.

The police said Zaslow’s car was struck by a semi-trailer truck after he had lost control of his vehicle on a snow-covered road near Elmira. No charges had been filed, the police said, but an investigation was under way.

Zaslow had attended a bookstore event in Elmira the night before, promoting his latest book, “The Magic Room: A Story About the Love We Wish for Our Daughters.” Published in December, the book was about the clientele of a long-established Michigan bridal shop.

Zaslow was drawn to stories about people seeking meaning in their lives, often in the face of mortality. Some of his books were based on stories in his column “Moving On” in The Wall Street Journal.

Besides Giffords, Zaslow worked on books with Chesley B. Sullenberger III, the pilot who landed the jet in the Hudson in 2009; and Randy Pausch, the subject and co-author of “The Last Lecture,” which has sold more than 5 million copies.

“The Last Lecture” began as a hunch. Pausch had announced that he was dying of an ailment similar to Lou Gehrig’s disease and was planning to sum things up in a last lecture for his students at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh in September 2007. Thinking it might make for a good column for the Journal, Zaslow, a Carnegie Mellon alumnus, drove from his base in Detroit to hear what he would say.

A tape of the 76-minute lecture Pausch gave that day, “Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams,” became a sensation on YouTube. Zaslow and Pausch teamed up to write a book based on it.

The book, published shortly before Pausch died of pancreatic cancer in 2008, was a best-seller in the hardcover advice and “how to” category in The New York Times for more than 100 weeks.

Another book was born from a column about the stark differences between men and women in the way they conduct their lives after a divorce. (For one thing, women tend to keep their friends, he found; men, not so much.)

The book, “The Girls From Ames: A Story of Women and a 40-Year Friendship,” was based on an article suggested by one of the many women who wrote to compliment him on his column and to verify the phenomenon he described with the facts of their own lives.

Almost every book he wrote became a best-seller, including his most recent, “Gabby: A Story of Courage and Hope,” published at the end of last year.

“He was curious about everything and interested in everything,” his wife, Sherry Margolis, said in an interview Friday. “And he knew what would make a good story.”