Josef Skvorecky, a Czech writer whose novel “The Engineer of Human Souls” is considered a classic account of the absurdity of life in a totalitarian state, died Jan. 3 at a hospital in Toronto, where he had lived for more than 40 years. He was 87.

His Canadian publisher and longtime friend, Louise Dennys, said he had cancer.

In addition to writing many books, Skvorecky played a significant part in publishing the works of other Czech dissident writers.

He and his wife, Zdena Salivarova, were the first publishers of Milan Kundera’s “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” as well as works by Bohumil Hrabal, Ivan Klima, Ludvik Vaculik and Vaclav Havel.

Skvorecky arranged for the books to be smuggled into Communist-controlled Czechoslovakia, where they were widely copied and passed from hand to hand as “samizdat,” or clandestine literature.

Skvorecky’s own books were circulated in the same manner. He often ran afoul of the country’s Communist authorities, and before leaving Czechoslovakia in 1969, he had lost jobs and had many of his works banned. But the sanctioned disapproval only made him more esteemed in the eyes of the Czech public.

“If you live in a country where politics are oppressive and you write,” Skvorecky said in a 1985 interview with the Paris Review, “you can’t avoid being a political writer.”

The first of his novels to gain recognition, “The Cowards,” came out in 1958, 10 years after it was written. The book’s satiric depiction of the Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia in the late 1940s prompted an instant backlash from the authorities, who sought to remove it from bookstore shelves.

It was also considered a literary breakthrough for its casual style, complete with street slang inspired by Skvorecky’s study of Ernest Hemingway and American detective fiction. The novel’s protagonist, Danny Smiricky, became a much-loved character who reappeared in many of Skvorecky’s later books.

The jazz-loving Danny, hapless but ever hopeful in love, was clearly Skvorecky’s alter ego. Both were would-be saxophonists who nurtured a lifelong fascination with American writers and culture.

Danny was the central character of “The Engineer of Human Souls,” which Skvorecky published in Czech in 1977 and in English in 1984. The book’s title came from a term used by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin to describe novelists.

The novel, whose seven chapters are named after English-language writers, follows Danny’s picaresque adventures through the decades, jumping from his youth in Czechoslovakia to his later life in Canada. Amid the threats and deprivations of life in the Soviet bloc, Danny never loses his cheerful goodwill as he stumbles from one calamity to another.

Skvorecky wrote many other well-regarded novels, including “Dvorak in Love,” “The Republic of Whores,” “The Bride of Texas,” and a series of detective novels, but “The Engineer of Human Souls” was recognized as his masterpiece.

“It is, in places, so entertaining that it would be dangerous to read it without laughing aloud; in other places it is sad or dismaying,” critic Richard Eder wrote in the Los Angeles Times. “What he has really written, though, is an epic of his country and its exiles.”

During World War II, Skvorecky was required to work in a German-run munitions factory, but he also began to read Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner and Raymond Chandler in English. He then studied at Prague’s Charles University, graduating in 1949 and receiving a doctorate in 1951, with a dissertation on Thomas Paine, one of the intellectual forefathers of the American Revolution.

He taught in a girls’ school, served in the Czech army, acted and worked in publishing in his youth. He translated Hemingway, Evelyn Waugh, Chandler and Ray Bradbury into Czech, adapting their styles for his own writing.

“I suddenly saw that you could write dialogue as people spoke it,” he said in 1985. “It opened my eyes.”

After Soviet tanks rolled into Prague in 1968, suppressing the promise of Prague Spring, Skvorecky and his wife fled Czechoslovakia and settled in Toronto. He taught American literature and film at the University of Toronto until 1990.

“Canada is the country where, for the first time in my adult life, I found freedom,” Skvorecky said in 2006. “My real country is the Czech language, which is the tongue I learned from my mother.”