At a time when government reports ask whether Americans care about reading anymore, the legacy of Nobel laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn reminds us that books can matter as much as life and death.

Mr. Solzhenitsyn, who died of heart failure Sunday at age 89, never stood before a tank in Tiananmen Square, but novels such as Cancer Ward and The First Circle landed like roadblocks before Soviet might, their power confirmed and magnified by his government's determination to stop them.

"Writers are a problem, they are a great problem, thank God," says Jason Epstein, a longtime editor at Random House who worked with Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal and others. "Without them we would be lost."

Mr. Solzhenitsyn's works, many set in Stalinist prison camps, were documents of persecution; his life was an example. Few writers, in any century, so painfully lived through and recorded the events of their times.

A front-line artillery captain in World War II, he was arrested for writing what he called "certain disrespectful remarks" about Stalin and served seven years in a labor camp in the barren steppe of Kazakhstan and three more years in internal exile in Central Asia.

A change in leadership (the 1964 ousting of Nikita Khrushchev) again made him an enemy. His papers were seized, his family threatened, his books smuggled abroad like nuclear documents. When his epic study of the Soviet prison system, The Gulag Archipelago, was published, he was arrested, deported and sent off in handcuffs.

"Mankind's sole salvation lies in everyone making everything his business; in the people of the East being vitally concerned with what is thought in the West, the people of the West vitally concerned with what goes on in the East," he once wrote.

Mr. Solzhenitsyn's widow, Natalya, told the Interfax news agency that her husband died as he had hoped to die.

"He wanted to die in the summer, and he died in the summer," she said. "He wanted to die at home, and he died at home. In general I should say that Alexander Isaevich lived a difficult but happy life."

The Associated Press