Berlin, April 14 (RHC)-- The Nobel Prize-winning German author Günter Grass has died at the age of 87. Until his death, Grass was considered to be Germany’s most famous living writer. He was best known for his 1959 novel, "The Tin Drum," widely considered a 20th century classic.

Gunter Grass also spoke out on a number of political issues, advocating nuclear disarmament and opposing war. He was barred from visiting Israel in 2012 after publishing a poem that described the nuclear-armed state as a threat to world peace.

In 2006, he drew controversy over his own past after admitting in a memoir he had concealed his membership in an elite Nazi unit, the Waffen SS, as a teenager. Grass said: "It was a weight on me. My silence over all these years is one of the reasons I wrote the book. It had to come out in the end."

Grass was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1999, praised for undertaking "the enormous task of reviewing contemporary history by recalling the disavowed and the forgotten."