Said had suffered from leukemia for years and died at a New York hospital late Wednesday, editor Shelley Wanger said. 

Said was born in 1935 in Jerusalem, then part of British-ruled Palestine, but he spent most of his adult life in the United States. He wrote passionately about the Palestinian cause but also on a variety of other subjects, from English literature, his academic specialty, to music and culture. 

When it came to the Arab-Israeli conflict, Said was consistently critical of Israel for what he regarded as mistreatment of the Palestinians.

He wrote two years ago after visits to Jerusalem and the West Bank that Israel's "efforts toward exclusivity and xenophobia toward the Arabs'' had actually strengthened Palestinian determination.

"Palestine and Palestinians remain, despite Israel's concerted efforts from the beginning either to get rid of them or to circumscribe them so much as to make them ineffective,'' Said wrote in the English-language Al-Ahram Weekly, published in Cairo.

In 2000, he prompted a controversy when he threw a rock toward an Israeli guardhouse on the Lebanese border. Columbia University did not censure him, saying that the stone was directed at no one, no law was broken and that his actions were protected by principles of academic freedom.

Said moved to the United States as a student. He received a bachelor's degree from Princeton in 1957 and a master's and Ph.D. from Harvard, in 1960 and 1964.

Most of his academic career was spent as a professor at Columbia University in New York, but he also was a visiting professor at such leading institutions as Yale, Harvard and Johns Hopkins.

Professor Said maintained his relentless engagement with people, culture, and politics all over the world, even in the last weeks of his decade-long struggle against illness.

Throughout the 1990s, Said's newspaper columns provided a constant critique of the depradations, falsehoods and failures of the Oslo "peace process" that led only to the further alienation of Palestinians from their land and a betrayal of the vision of reconciliation and justice for which he strived. Said was among the first to understand and articulate how this process, premised on preserving the vast power imbalances and injustices between Israelis and Palestinians, would lead to the present disaster, and he never shirked from criticizing the Palestinian leaders who contributed to this state of affairs.

Said's journey back to his birthplace in Palestine in the early 1990s, after decades of exile, helped many Palestinians to come to terms with their own experience of exile and dispossession and encouraged many Palestinians to embark on their own journeys home. Said's books, among them "The Question of Palestine," "After the Last Sky," "The Politics of Dispossession," and the memoir of his youth, "Out of Place," remain seminal works which both personalize and humanize the Palestinian predicament and place it in political context. In his memoir, he revealed the depth of his courage and honesty by facing himself, his past, and his society with a critical eye.

Despite the worsening situation in Palestine, Said never succumbed to despair. Until the very end of his life, he was actively engaged in the Palestinian National Initiative, a movement to mobilize the energy of the entire population towards a non-violent struggle for peace and liberation.

Yet the greatest significance of Said's contribution is not only that he was an outstanding advocate for justice and peace in Palestine, but also that he consistently located this cause within a much greater struggle for a truly universal and humanist vision, entailing a firm rejection of ethno-nationalism and religious fanaticism. He taught by eloquent example that being faithful to a cause did not require blind loyalty to leaders or symbols, but rather necessitated self-criticism and debate. This fact meant that his engagement with the Arab world, and his fierce criticism of its status quo, was as important as his work communicating with people in the West.

Edward Said was a fountain of humanity, compassion, intellectual restlessness and creativity. At a time when the crude calculus of raw power and fanaticism threatens to swamp global discourse, his irreplaceable voice never needed to be heard more.