In 1951, he went to Istanbul and began more than a decade of work at the prestigious newspaper Cumhuriyet. Wishing to escape the notoriety of his youth — he had discovered Marxism in Adana and been imprisoned for several months on charges of spreading Communist ideas — he adopted a pen name, Yasar Kemal. In 1962, he joined the leftish Turkish Workers Party, and he served as one of its leaders until quitting after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.

Although his books focus on the hard lives of peasants and the valor of rebels who spring up among them, his work is also notable for its focus on environmental destruction. The burning of forests, the draining of swamps and the slaughter of dolphins are among the evils he portrays as ruinous results of greed.

As a young journalist, Mr. Kemal played a key role in stopping the planned destruction of a historic Armenian shrine, the Holy Cross Church on Akhtamar Island in eastern Turkey. Armenians are sympathetic characters in several of his novels. In 2013, the Armenian Ministry of Culture gave him its “Krikor Naregatsi” decoration to recognize “his tribute to Armenian cultural heritage and his courage, as well as his commitment to universal values related to justice, freedom and human dignity.”

If Mr. Kemal had a stylistic comrade, it was Turkey’s greatest poet, Nazim Hikmet, who was also a Communist and died in Moscow in 1963 after being chased from his homeland. Both men rejected the heavy, formalized language of Ottoman literature and instead wrote vivid narratives infused with traditional stories, myths, proverbs and colloquialisms.

In 1996, after asserting in the German magazine Der Spiegel that Kurds had a right to break away from Turkey, and following that with an article in the London journal Index on Censorship denouncing the “racist, oppressive regime” that “crushed all the people of Anatolia like a steamroller,” he was tried and given a suspended sentence of 20 months in prison for “inciting hatred.”

Mr. Kemal lived long enough to see his government move toward democracy and change its approach to its Kurdish population. In his later years, he was showered with honors, including the Presidential Cultural and Artistic Grand Prize, Turkey’s highest cultural award, in 2008.

By that time, his global reputation was assured, but a younger generation of Turkish writers, many of them modernists who emerged from the urban elite rather than the peasantry, was eclipsing him. When Orhan Pamuk, the most prominent of them, won the Nobel Prize in 2006, Mr. Kemal’s chances evaporated. Yet these novelists acknowledged their debt to him.