William Zinsser had been a writer and editor for 30 years, covering subjects as varied as shad running in the Hudson River and the Mau-Mau revolt in Kenya, when he complained to his wife that his well had gone dry.

She had a brilliant idea: “You should write a book about how to write,” she said.

Two years later, in 1976, Zinsser’s guide “On Writing Well” hit bookstores across America. With more than 1 million copies sold, it became a sturdy companion for amateurs and professionals alike seeking to express themselves with clarity, economy and human warmth.

Among the principles Zinsser held most dear was simplicity. Be grateful for every word that can be pruned. Banish official-sounding gobbledygook, hyperbole and frivolous flourishes.

“Clutter is the disease of American writing,” Zinsser declared in the first pages of his bestseller. “We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills and meaningless jargon.”

Zinsser died Tuesday at his New York City home after a short illness, his wife, Caroline Fraser Zinsser, told The Associated Press. He was 92.

A former staffer at the New York Herald Tribune, Zinsser later freelanced for The Atlantic, The New Yorker and other magazines and was executive editor of the Book-of-the-Month Club.

He wrote or edited two dozen books, including “”Writing about Your Life: A Journey into the Past” (2004) and “Writing Places: The Life Journey of a Writer and Teacher” (2009).

In his last years, the self-described “lifelong child of paper” even wrote a popular blog, “Zinsser on Fridays,” for the American Scholar. It won a National Magazine Award for digital commentary in 2012.

He had his greatest impact, however, as a teacher of writing. He was a member of the English faculty at Yale University for most of the 1970s, imparting his plainspoken truths about his craft to students who became professional writers, including Christopher Buckley, Mark Singer and Jane Mayer.

Zinsser was born in New York on Oct. 7, 1922. Once described by George F. Will as a “self-effacing and decorous WASP,” he grew up on Long Island in a prosperous household.

A graduate of Princeton University, Zinsser served in the Army during World War II. Then, rejecting the family shellac business, he went into journalism. He worked at the New York Herald Tribune from 1946 to 1959 in a variety of jobs, including feature writer, drama editor and film critic.

He married Caroline Fraser in 1954. Besides his wife, he is survived by two children, Amy and John; and several grandchildren.

After leaving the paper Zinsser turned to freelancing. His assignments included celebrity profiles, such as a 1963 feature for the Saturday Evening Post on an up-and-coming comic named Woody Allen. Almost two decades later, Allen gave Zinsser a tiny role in 1980’s “Stardust Memories” as an unfriendly Catholic priest.

By then Zinsser was a guru of good writing, but he never portrayed himself as infallible.

In “On Writing Well” he shared with readers two pages of what appeared to be the first draft of the book. It bore heavy editing marks, with bloated sentences crossed out and weak words replaced with more vivid ones. In fact, as he explained, those pages were from the final manuscript that he had already rewritten four or five times. He was, he wrote, “always amazed at how much clutter can still be cut.”

Zinsser offered his insights in what one reviewer called a “crisp and bossy” manner.

Among his maxims:

“Clear thinking becomes clear writing: One can’t exist without the other.”

“Few people realize how badly they write … The point is that you have to strip down your writing before you can build it back up.”

“Simplify, simplify.”

He revised his book half a dozen times, adding examples of writing by women. He was himself a work in progress, who chronicled his own transformations. When personal computers replaced typewriters, he adapted and wrote “Writing with a Word Processor” (1983). His next book summed up what he saw as the ultimate purpose of his craft: “Writing to Learn.”

In 2009, when American Scholar approached him about writing a blog, he was reluctant. But he became a convert.

“When my article was posted on the website … it got 16,000 hits. Yikes! There were real people out there! … . On that day,” he wrote in 2011, “my umbilical cord to Mother Paper was snipped.”

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