Andrea Dworkin, the American feminist whose views on pornography and women’s rights polarised opinion, has died at her Washington DC home at the age of 58.

Elaine Markson, her agent, said she had not recovered well from recent knee surgery: "She was rather frail of late." She had been ill for many years and suffered from a number of conditions including osteoarthritis.

Born in 1946 in New Jersey, Dworkin's first book, Woman Hating, was published at the age of 27 and began a lifelong campaign on the way pornography harms women.

"Pornography is used in rape - to plan it, to execute it, to choreograph it, to engender the excitement to commit the act," Dworkin testified before the New York Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography in 1986.

Ms Markson said she campaigned frequently on the subject and helped draft a 1983 law that defined pornography as a civil rights violation against women.

The law - overturned by a federal appeals court in 1985 but later upheld by the US Supreme Court - was inspired by the case of Linda Marchiano, who as Linda Lovelace appeared in the pornographic film Deep Throat.

Dworkin joined Gloria Steinem, the founder of Ms magazine, and Catharine MacKinnon, another anti-pornography campaigner, in trying to sue on Lovelace's behalf. She said she was abused and forced to appear in the 1970s film.

Ms Steinem said: "In every century, there are a handful of writers who help the human race to evolve. Andrea is one of them."

Lisa Jardine, a professor of English at Queen Mary, University of London, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: "She was a warrior."

Elaine Markson commented: "Some in the media liked to picture her as tough and hard and difficult but she was soft and with a lovely voice and a good sense of humour."

Dworkin wrote more than a dozen books, including Scapegoat: The Jews, Israel, and Women’s Liberation, which won the American Book Award in 2001. She was working on a book provisionally titled Writing America: How Novelists Invented and Gendered a Nation, when she died.

Some commentators found many of her views difficult to understand, let alone agree with. Welcoming a novel called Dirty Weekend by Helen Zahavi in 1991, Dworkin said it would "help us to fight the war waged by men against women. Women do not make men suffer as much by killing them as a man does by raping a woman."

Few critics praised her books, possibly because of the confronting language she used. Her 1986 book Intercourse stated: "Intercourse remains a means, or a means, of physiologically making a woman inferior: communicating to her, cell by cell, her own inferior status ... pushing and thrusting until she gives up and gives in - which is called surrender in the male lexicon."

One reviewer said "Ms Dworkin hates men and sex", while the London Review of Books once said she was "overweight and ugly".

"I almost wanted to call the man up in a spirit of friendship and say ‘please don't burn your Balzac’," Dworkin told The Times in 1988. "I wanted to say: ‘please, don't go through your library and tear up the people who you don't want to go to bed with’. Male writers just never get treated that way, it's disgusting."

Catherine Bennett, interviewing her for The Times, wrote that she is "a very large woman whose appearance in T-shirt, trainers and shapeless dungarees would undoubtedly instil yet more revulsion in the reviewer from the London Review of Books".

Perhaps the most controversial incident of her career occurred in 1999, when she said she had been drugged and raped by two men in a Paris hotel room. She failed to contact hotel security or police which led some critics to suggest that the rape did not take place.

A public memorial for Dworkin will be held in New York later this month.

Times Recommends

• 'New York has lost its edge'
• Copenhagen will fail – and quite right too
• More than 17,000 new underwater species found