LOS ANGELES — Terry Anderson, the globe-trotting Associated Press correspondent who became one of America’s longest-held hostages after he was snatched from a street in war-torn Lebanon in 1985 and held for nearly seven years, has died at 76.

Anderson, who chronicled his abduction and torturous imprisonment by Islamic militants in his best-selling 1993 memoir “Den of Lions,” died Sunday at his home in Greenwood Lake, New York, said his daughter Sulome Anderson. The cause of death was unknown. His daughter said Anderson recently had heart problems.

“He never liked to be called a hero, but that’s what everyone persisted in calling him,” she said. “I saw him a week ago and my partner asked him if he had anything on his bucket list, anything that he wanted to do. He said, ‘I’ve lived so much and I’ve done so much. I’m content.’ ”

After returning to the United States in 1991, Anderson led a life of varied interests, giving public speeches, teaching journalism at several prominent universities and, at times, operating a blues bar, Cajun restaurant, horse ranch and gourmet restaurant.

He also struggled with post-traumatic stress disorder, won millions of dollars in frozen Iranian assets after a federal court concluded that country played a role in his capture, then lost most of it to bad investments. He filed for bankruptcy in 2009.

Upon retiring from the University of Florida in 2015, Anderson settled on a small horse farm in Virginia he had discovered while camping with friends.

“It’s reasonably good weather and quiet out here and a nice place, so I’m doing all right,” he said with a chuckle in a 2018 AP interview.

In 1985 he became one of several Westerners abducted by members of the Shiite Muslim group Hezbollah during a time of war that had plunged Lebanon into chaos.

As the AP’s chief Middle East correspondent, Anderson had been reporting for years on the rising violence gripping Lebanon as the country fought a war with Israel, while Iran funded militant groups trying to topple its government.

On March 16, 1985, a day off, he had taken a break to play tennis with former AP photographer Don Mell and was dropping Mell off at his home when gun-toting kidnappers dragged him from his car.

He was likely targeted, he said, because he was one of the few Westerners still in Lebanon and because his role as a journalist aroused suspicion among members of Hezbollah.

“Because in their terms, people who go around asking questions in awkward and dangerous places have to be spies,” he told the Virginia newspaper The Review of Orange County in 2018.

What followed was nearly seven years of brutality during which he was beaten, chained to a wall, threatened with death, had guns held to his head and often was kept in solitary confinement for long periods.

At the time of his abduction, Anderson was engaged and his future wife was six months pregnant with their daughter, Sulome.

The couple married soon after his release but divorced a few years later.

Terry Alan Anderson was born Oct. 27, 1947. He spent his early childhoodyears in the small Lake Erie town of Vermilion, Ohio, where his father was a police officer. He turned down a scholarship to the University of Michigan in favor of enlisting in the Marines, where he rose to the rank of staff sergeant while seeing combat in the Vietnam War.

After returning home, he enrolled at Iowa State University where he graduated with a double major in journalism and political science and soon after went to work for the AP. He reported from Kentucky, Japan and South Africa before arriving in Lebanon in 1982, just as the country was descending into chaos.

“Actually, it was the most fascinating job I’ve ever had in my life,” he told The Review. “It was intense. War’s going on — it was very dangerous in Beirut. Vicious civil war, and I lasted about three years before I got kidnapped.”

He was married and divorced three times. He is survived by another daughter, Gabrielle Anderson.