His son, Stepan Solzhenitsyn, told The Associated Press his father died of heart failure late Sunday at his home near Moscow, Russia.
Awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1970 for "The First Circle," Alexander Solzhenitsyn was considered a moral voice for Russia. His works centered on issues of good and evil, materialism and salvation.
His three-volume "Gulag Archipelago" unveiled the horrors of the Soviet labor camps, where he himself was imprisoned for eight years.
"Even as a child, without any prompting from others, I wanted to be a writer and, indeed, I turned out a good deal of the usual juvenilia," Solzhenitsyn said in a short autobiography written for the Nobel Foundation.