Russian novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn died of heart failure on August 3, 2008. He was 89 years old.ABC News (Australia): Writer Solzhenitsyn Dead at 89 (August 3, 2008)

• One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962)
• The Cancer Ward (1968)
• The First Circle (1968)
• The Gulag Archipelago (1974)

Born just over a year after the creation of the Soviet Union, Solzhenitsyn served in the Red Army during the Second World War. After writing a letter to a friend in which he criticized Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, Solzhenitsyn was sent to a labor camp, or gulag. His experience in the Soviet forced labor system formed the basis for his novels The Cancer Ward, The First Circle and The Gulag Archipelago. Solzhenitsyn won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970. In 1974, after the publication of The Gulag Archipelago, he was forced to leave the Soviet Union and settled in the United States. After the fall of the Soviet Union, he returned to Russia in 1994.ABC News (Australia): Writer Solzhenitsyn Dead at 89 (August 3, 2008)