Throughout a long career as a freelance journalist, he wrote about a variety of social topics, including housing for the rural poor, racial issues, and the elderly.
Over the next 30 years, he wrote for a wide variety of publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Nation, The New Republic, Smithsonian, Working Papers, The Boston Globe, The Christian Science Monitor, Change, Harper's, Life, Redbook and Next.
In 1972, he helped launch Rural America, a nonprofit advocacy organization based in Washington, D.C.[1] In 1983–84, he was a Fellow at the Harvard's Kennedy Institute of Politics in Cambridge, MA.
His published works include: Following his death in 1991, family and friends created the Richard J. Margolis award to promote nonfiction writers and promising journalists writing about social-justice issues.
His wife, Diane R. Margolis, (1933–) is a sociologist and author of several books, including The Managers: Corporate Life in America (1990), The Fabric of Self (1998), and We Built a Village: Cohousing and the Commons (2023).