Josef Skvorecky, Czech-Born Writer, Dies at 87 Josef Skvorecky, a renowned Czech author who drew on his experiences under the Nazis and the Communists to write fiction that captured the corruptions and humiliations of the 20th century, died on Tuesday in Toronto. He was 87 and had lived and continued to write in Canada for many years. One of his translators, Paul Wilson, who confirmed the death, said Mr. Skvorecky had been treated for cancer and respiratory ailments. Mr. Skvorecky was in the front rank of a generation of Czech writers who achieved international attention for dissident literature produced in the face of Communist censorship. Among his peers, and friends, were Milan Kundera, Bohumil Hrabal, the Nobel Prize-winning poet Jaroslav Seifert and Vaclav Havel, the playwright and former Czech president who died two weeks earlier. Mr. Skvorecky's most enduring creation was an alter ego, Danny Smiricky, a jazz-loving, northern Bohemian admirer of Mark Twain. Danny, who appears in about half of Mr. Skvorecky's dozen or more novels, struggles - not always heroically - to maintain decency amid the terrors and indignities of totalitarian society. In descriptions of forced labor in a Nazi factory, Communist censors, Soviet tanks, political purges, false accusations, stool pigeons and women who allure and tease, Mr. Skvorecky offered glimpses of his life. Danny made his debut in the author's first novel, "The Cowards," which Mr. Skvorecky finished in 1949, when he was 25. It was not published until nine years later, however, and when it did appear, it was banned, becoming the first great underground classic of postwar Czechoslovakia. In all, Mr. Skvorecky (pronounced shik-VOHR-et-skee) wrote more than 30 books, including essays, literary criticism, detective mysteries and collections of short stories. He also wrote for film and television and translated American classics into Czech, having been drawn to American literature from an early age, particularly to Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Twain. After leaving Czechoslovakia during the Soviet suppression of the "Prague Spring" in 1968, Mr. Skvorecky taught American literature at the University of Toronto, where he also wrote of the émigré life and of Western students with no sense of history. Over the next two decades he and his wife, Zdena Salivarova, a writer and actress, published several hundred books that had been banned in their home country, sustaining Czech literature while introducing it to an international readership. With Mr. Kundera, Mr. Skvorecky shared a fascination with the private lives of people shadowed by the heavyhanded police state, seeking pleasures - whether those of friendship, music or sex - in an otherwise joyless political climate. Mr. Skvorecky spoke of his own experience in the introduction to his novella "The Bass Saxophone": In the days when everything in life was fresh - because we were 16, 17 - I used to blow tenor sax. Very poorly. Our band was called Red Music, which in fact was a misnomer, since the name had no political connotations: there was a band in Prague that called itself Blue Music and we, living in the Nazi Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, had no idea that in jazz blue is not a color, so we called ours Red. But if the name itself had no political connotations, our sweet, wild music did; for jazz was a sharp thorn in the sides of the power-hungry men, from Hitler to Brezhnev, who successfully ruled in my native land. Josef Vaclav Skvorecky, who had the look of a stolid burgher with eyes that seemed always preparing to smile, was born in Nachod, Bohemia, in what was then Czechoslovakia, on Sept. His father was a bank clerk. A playmate was Milos Forman, who went on to fame as the director of films like "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" and "Amadeus." Michael T. Kaufman, a former correspondent for The Times, died in 2010. Daniel E. Slotnik contributed reporting.