Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel Prize-winning author whose books exposed and chronicled the vast network of Stalin's slave labour camps, lived "a difficult but happy life," his wife said.

The author's son, Stepan Solzhenitsyn, told The Associated Press his father died late Sunday of heart failure at age 89.This Sept. 17, 1993, photo shows Alexander Solzhenitsyn in Paris. Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel Prize-winning author whose books chronicled the horrors of the Soviet gulag system, died of heart failure late Sunday. He was 89. (Jacques Brinon/Associated Press)

Solzhenitsyn's unflinching accounts of torment and survival in the Soviet Union's gulag of camps riveted his countrymen, whose sad secret history he helped expose. Those accounts earned him 20 years of bitter exile, but international renown.

And they inspired millions, perhaps, with the knowledge that one person's courage and integrity could help defeat the totalitarian machinery of an empire.

His wife, Natalya, told the Interfax news agency that her husband, who suffered along with millions of Russians in the prison camp system, 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."

Solzhenitsyn's death inspired many tributes, including one from the man who dismantled the last of the gulag camps in the 1980s, former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev.

"Solzhenitsyn's fate, as well as the fate of millions of the country's citizens, was befallen by severe trials," Gorbachev said, according to Interfax. "He was one of the first who spoke aloud about the inhuman Stalinist regime and about the people who experienced it but were not broken."

Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, a veteran of the Soviet KGB, nevertheless forged a close relationship with the fiercely patriotic Solzhenitsyn.

Solzhenitsyn's literary achievements, as well as "the entire thorny path of his life," Putin said in a statement, "will remain for us an example of genuine devotion and selfless serving to the people, fatherland and the ideals of freedom, justice and humanism."

The 'meat grinder' of slave labour camps

Beginning with the 1962 short novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Solzhenitsyn devoted himself to describing what he called the human "meat grinder" that had caught him along with millions of other Soviet citizens: capricious arrests, often for trifling and seemingly absurd reasons, followed by sentences to slave labour camps where cold, starvation and punishing work crushed inmates physically and spiritually.Russia's President Vladimir Putin visits Alexander Solzhenitsyn in his house on the outskirts of Moscow in June 2007. Putin praised the writer for serving 'the ideals of freedom, justice and humanism.' (RIA Novosti, Presidential Press Service, Mikhail Klimentyev/Associated Press)

His Gulag Archipelago trilogy of the 1970s left readers shocked by the savagery of the Soviet state under the dictator Joseph Stalin.

But his account of that secret system of prison camps was also inspiring in its description of how one person — Solzhenitsyn himself — survived, physically and spiritually, in a penal system of soul-crushing hardship and injustice.

His first book was One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, the story of a carpenter struggling to survive in a Soviet labor camp. The book was published by order of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, who was eager to discredit the abuses of Stalin, his predecessor.

After Khrushchev was ousted in 1964, Solzhenitsyn faced KGB harassment, publication of his works was blocked and he was expelled from the Soviet Writers Union. But he was undeterred from writing.

Expelled to West Germany

He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970, an unusual move for the Swedish Academy, which generally makes awards late in an author's life.

Soviet authorities barred the author from traveling to Stockholm to receive the award and official attacks were intensified in 1973 when the first book in the Gulag trilogy appeared in Paris.

The following year, he was arrested on treason charges and expelled the next day to West Germany in handcuffs. His expulsion inspired worldwide condemnation of Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev.

'We have to condemn publicly the very idea that some people have the right to repress others. In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousandfold in the future.' —Excerpt from Gulag Archipelago, published 1973

Solzhenitsyn eventually moved to America, settling in the tiny town of Cavendish, Vt., with his wife and sons, for the next 18 years. There he worked on what he considered to be

his life's work, a multi-volume saga of Russian history titled The Red Wheel.

The West offered him shelter and accolades. But Solzhenitsyn's refusal to bend despite enormous pressure also gave him the courage to criticize Western culture for what he considered its weakness and decadence.

Disappointment upon return to Russia

Gorbachev restored Solzhenitsyn's citizenship in 1990 and the treason charge was finally dropped in 1991, less than a month after the failed Soviet coup.

After a triumphant return that included a 56-day train trip across Russia to become reacquainted with his native land, Solzhenitsyn later expressed annoyance and disappointment that most Russians hadn't read his books.

During the 1990s, his stalwart nationalist views, his devout Orthodox Christianity, his disdain for capitalism and disgust with the tycoons who bought Russian industries and resources for kopeks on the ruble following the Soviet collapse, were unfashionable. He faded from public view.

But during Putin's presidency, Solzhenitsyn's vision of Russia as a bastion of Orthodox Christianity, as a place with a unique culture and destiny, gained renewed prominence.

Solzhenitsyn is survived by his wife, Natalya, and his three sons, Stepan, Ignat and Yermolai. All live in the United States.