Author Farley Mowat, who has died at age 92, was a provocative Canadian must-read

If you went through the Canadian school system, you were sure to have had a Farley Mowat book, maybe more than one on your English class reading list.

The prolific, often provocative storyteller, died Tuesday less than a week before his 93rd birthday. The death was announced on the author's web site.

Mowat, who wrote more than 40 books that sold an estimated 17 million copies worldwide, introduced generations of Canadians to the wilds of their country and its natural wonders.

Never Cry Wolf, Lost in the Barrens, The Dog Who Wouldn't Be, Owls in the Family (my childhood copy is still on my bookshelf), The Snow Walker. They were titles that earned Mowat the "beloved author" label.

But he was also a passionate environmentalist whose works attacked the wilful damage humanity was causing. He channelled the anger that never left him after his experiences as a combat soldier in the Second World War into outraged chronicles of how civilization was damaging the natural world and northern aboriginal people.

It resulted in books like Eastern Passage, People of the Deer, Sea of Slaughter and A Whale for the Killing, one of his best known works and one of several that were turned into movies.

The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society named its flagship after him, though the boat was seized by the Canadian Coast Guard in 2008 over the group's interference with fishing operations off the Newfoundland Coast.

His last major work, the memoir Eastern Passage (2010), suggested the deaths of Beluga whales in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence in the 1950s was tied to the covered-up dumping of a nuclear bomb in those waters by the U.S. Air Force bomber with engine trouble in 1945.

[ Related: Farley Mowat, author of 'The Boat Who Wouldn't Float' has died ]

Mowat, who wrote more than 40 books, was an officer of the Order of Canada and a recipient of the Governor General's Literary Award.

“Farley Mowat was a passionate Canadian who shaped a lot of my generation growing up with his books,” Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau told reporters Wednesday on Parliament Hill, according to CTV News. “He will be sorely missed.”

Despite the acclaim, Mowat never allowed himself to embrace the image of beloved literary icon. He could be prickly and nurtured a pessimism about humanity.

“I thought these books would change the way people think about the natural world and the course of human destiny," Mowat told the Toronto Star in an excellent 2012 interview piece.

“But we’re still killing whales. We’re still killing wolves. We’re still contaminating the air and the land and the water around us. We’re exploiting, not developing, our physical resources. We’re reaching into distant space, doing much the same thing there.

“We’re under some gross misconception that we’re a good species, going somewhere important, and that at the last minute we’ll correct our errors and God will smile on us. It’s delusion.”

Mowat was born in Belleville, Ont., on May 12, 1921, but his family moved frequently during his youth and he spent time in several Ontario towns as well as Saskatoon, Sask. It's there that the lonely teenager began his writing career, doing a birding column for the Saskatoon Star Phoenix.

He enlisted in the army in 1940, entering as a private and leaving as a captain in 1945, a military career that included the bloody Italian campaign and work as an intelligence officer during the campaign to liberate Holland. Those experiences became grist for works such as And No Birds Sang and The Regiment.

Having studied biology before the war, Mowat wanted to become a researcher and embarked on scientific expedition to the Arctic in the late 1940s, still coping with the psychological after-effects of his combat experiences.

“I didn’t like the human goddamn race,” he told the Globe and Mail in 2005. “I had seen enough of its real naked horror during the war to convince me that we weren’t worth the powder to blow us to hell.”

He hoped encountering the simpler life of northern people would reaffirm his faith in humanity. But instead he found starving Inuit and an apparently indifferent, perhaps even actively malicious, government that was destroying their way of life, the Globe said.

His then wife, Francis, was also threatening divorce because of his absence, so he aborted his trip.

His first book, People of the Deer, published in 1952, was about what he saw on that journey, helping expose the plight of northern aboriginal people.

[ Related: Some of Canadian writer Farley Mowat's best-known works ]

However, Mowat's observations were challenged at the time, and more deeply in a 1996 article in Saturday Night magazine. Entitled A Real Whopper, it questioned the basis for his entire approach to his non-fiction works, accusing him of exaggerating and inventing elements to make his points.

Mowat defended his methods.

“I wanted the truth about what happened to those people to be revealed,” he said about People of the Deer in 2009, according to the Globe.

“I hoped by revealing it I would accomplish something in terms of our future behaviour towards native people and perhaps for their survivors. The objective was legitimate and valid, but the process was not a process we like in our society, which operates on the basis of candid truth.”

But the controversy never overshadowed the acclaim he received for his dozens of books, credited with raising Canadians' consciousness about their land and bringing environmental issues to the forefront.

Mowat won the Governor General's Award in 1956 for Lost in the Barrens, about two teens – one white, won aboriginal – who use their survival skills to save themselves after becoming stranded above the tree line. He won the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour in 1970 for The Boat that Wouldn't Float, and was made an officer in the Order of Canada in 1981.

He had two sons, David and Robert, by his first marriage and his second wife, Claire Mowat, is also an author.