Alexander Solzhenitsyn AP PHOTO

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel Prize-winning author whose books exposed and chronicled the vast network of Joseph Stalin's slave labor camps, has died of heart failure at age 89, his family said.

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. They 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.