LOS ANGELES — Singer-songwriter Peter Yarrow, one-third of the iconic folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary, has died. He was 86.

Yarrow, with Noel Paul Stookey and Mary Travers, captured the attention of millions with their songs in favor of civil rights and against the Vietnam War. During one span in the 1960s, they released six Billboard Top 10 singles, two No. 1 albums and won five Grammys.

“Our fearless dragon is tired and has entered the last chapter of his magnificent life. The world knows Peter Yarrow the iconic folk activist, but the human being behind the legend is every bit as generous, creative, passionate, playful, and wise as his lyrics suggest,” his daughter Bethany said in a statement to The Associated Press.

Yarrow penned the group’s most enduring song, “Puff the Magic Dragon.”

The song was one of the group’s most successful, peaking at No. 2 in August 1963, according to Billboard.

Publicist Ken Sunshine told The Associated Press that Yarrow, who died Tuesday in New York, had bladder cancer for the past four years.

With Yarrow’s death and Travers’ passing in 2009 at age 72, Stookey, 87, is the group’s last living member.

In addition to their own success, the group provided exposure to the music of Bob Dylan. The trio’s recordings of two of his songs, “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” and “Blowin’ in the Wind,” became Billboard Top 10 hits during an American renaissance in folk music.

The group performed the song during the 1963 March on Washington, at which Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech.

As a child in a middle class family in New York, Yarrow took violin lessons. He later switched to guitar, embracing the work of folk-music icons such as Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, the AP said.

He struggled as a musician in New York until connecting with Stookey and Travers. Although his degree was in psychology, he had found his true calling in folk music while at Cornell University.

“I saw these young people at Cornell who were basically very conservative in their backgrounds opening their hearts up and singing with an emotionality and a concern through this vehicle called folk music,” Associated Press quoted him as saying. “It gave me a clue that the world was on its way to a certain kind of movement, and that folk music might play a part in it and that I might play a part in folk music.”

Yarrow had met famed music manager Albert Grossman after a performance at the Newport Folk Festival. Grossman was looking to put together a vocal group in the vein of the Weavers, a harmony quartet from the 1940s and 50s that sang traditional folk and labor songs as well as children’s tunes and gospel, Billboard said.

After teaming with Stookey and Travers, the group rehearsed for months before they became an overnight sensation when their first album.

“Peter, Paul and Mary,” released in 1962, reached No. 1 on the Billboard chart. Their second, “In the Wind,” reached No. 4 and their third, “Moving,” put them back at No. 1.

While the trio often sang about war and injustice, they also had a soft side.

In “Puff the Magic Dragon,” which Yarrow wrote with a friend while at Cornell, they sang of Jackie Paper, a young boy who embarks on countless adventures with his make-believe dragon friend until he outgrows such childhood fantasies and leaves a sobbing, heartbroken Puff behind.

As the lyrics explain: “A dragon lives forever, but not so little boys.”

Yarrow is survived by his ex-wife, a daughter and a son.