His play Division Street opened at the Ambassador Theatre in New York City on October 8, 1980. The production starred John Lithgow and Keene Curtis. It closed after 21 performances. The play was revived in 1987 at the Second Stage, with Saul Rubinek in the lead role. Tesich reunited with Peter Yates, the director of Breaking Away, on the 1981 thriller Eyewitness starring Sigourney Weaver, William Hurt, Morgan Freeman, and Christopher Plummer. His next screenplay was for the semi-autobiographical film Four Friends which was directed by Arthur Penn which covered the activism and turbulence of the 1960s. Vincent Canby of the New York Times wrote in his review: "For Mr. Tesich, it is another original work by one of our best young screenwriters." Roger Ebert wrote in the Chicago Sun-Times that it was "a very good movie." He adapted John Irving's novel The World According to Garp for the screen in 1982 directed by George Roy Hill and starring Robin Williams and Glenn Close in her film debut. The best-selling novel had been described as unfilmable. The screenplay was nominated for Best Drama Adapted from Another Medium by the Writers Guild of America (WGA) in 1983. Tesich returned to the sport of cycling with the screenplay for American Flyers (1985). The main characters were two brothers, played by Kevin Costner and David Marshall Grant, who enter a long-distance bicycle race in the Colorado Rockies. His final screenplay was for the 1985 film Eleni starring John Malkovich, Kate Nelligan, and Linda Hunt, based on the Nicholas Gage book also directed by Peter Yates. His novel Karoo was published posthumously in 1998. Arthur Miller described the novel: "Fascinating—a real satiric invention full of wise outrage." The novel was a New York Times Notable Book for 1998. The novel also appeared in a German translation as Abspann, and it was also translated in France in 2012 where it was acclaimed by the critics and became a best-seller. Oxford Dictionaries credits Tesich with the first use of the term "post-truth," which Oxford defined as "circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief." Ralph Keyes, author of The Post-Truth Era (2004), also says he first saw the term "in a 1992 Nation essay by the late Steve Tesich." Post-truth was Oxford's 2016 Word of the Year. Death Tesich died in Sydney, Nova Scotia, Canada