Celebrated Indian-American novelist Ved Mehta, who overcame blindness and became widely known as the 20th-century writer most responsible for introducing American readers to India, has died at his home here at the age of 86.

The New Yorker magazine, where he had been a staff writer for 33 years, reported that Mehta died on Saturday.

"Mehta, a writer for The New Yorker for more than thirty years, died at the age of eighty-six, on Saturday morning,” it said on Sunday.

Born in pre-partition Lahore to a well-off Punjabi family in 1934, Mehta lost his eyesight when he was three years old to meningitis.

"Daddyji" was the first installment in what was to become a 12-volume series of autobiographical works, known collectively as “Continents of Exile.” "Ved Mehta has established himself as one of the magazine’s most imposing figures,” The New Yorker’s storied editor William Shawn, who hired him as a staff writer in 1961, told The New York Times in 1982.

The recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” in 1982, Mehta was long praised by critics for his forthright, luminous prose — with its “informal elegance, diamond clarity and hypnotic power,” as The Sunday Herald of Glasgow put it in a 2005 profile, the New York Times reported on Sunday.

He could rework a single article more than a hundred times, he often said, the report said.

One of the most striking hallmarks of Mehta’s prose was its profusion of visual description: of the rich and varied landscapes he encountered, of the people he interviewed, of the cities he visited, the NYT report said.

Madhur Jaffrey, the Indian-born actress and cookbook author, once told Maureen Dowd, of the New York Times, that when she first met Mehta, “I tried to take his arm” to help.

Some of his most fascinating work includes “A Battle Against the Bewitchment of Our Intelligence” (1961), a portrait of British intellectual life and the philosophical debates of the time; “John Is Easy to Please” (1971), a piece about the young linguist Noam Chomsky and the critics of his theory of transformational grammar; and, in 1976, a three-part Profile of Mahatma Gandhi, the report said.

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