Larry Kramer, the noted writer whose raucous, antagonistic campaign for an all-out response to the AIDS crisis helped shift national health policy in the 1980s and ’90s, died on Wednesday morning in Manhattan.

Kramer accused of “murder” and “genocide” recognized that his outbursts were part of a strategy to shock the country into dealing with AIDS as a public-health emergency.

Kramer wrote an open letter published in The San Francisco Examiner in 1988 calling him a killer and “an incompetent idiot.”.

Fauci said in an interview for this obituary, “you found that Larry Kramer made a lot of sense, and that he had a heart of gold.”.

Kramer, he said, had helped him to see how the federal bureaucracy was indeed slowing the search for effective treatments.

Kramer developed a grudging friendship with Dr.

Kramer developed liver disease and underwent the transplant in 2001; Dr.

Kramer said in an email to the reporter John Leland of The New York Times for an article published at the end of March.

Kramer was at work on a play centered on the epidemic.

“It’s about gay people having to live through three plagues,” he told Mr.

Kramer wrote the screenplay for the ill-fated musical remake of the classic 1937 film “Lost Horizon.”.

(On the contrary, Mr. Kramer responded, it was more a documentary than a work of fiction.) Others complained that it libeled gay people generally, that it lacked literary merit, and that the narrator’s epiphany — one “must have the strength and courage to say no” — was not exactly a stroke of genius.

George Kramer had earned undergraduate and law degrees from Yale University but was unable to make a decent living during the Depression.

His protective older brother, Arthur, was the scholar-athlete of the family, on his way to becoming a prominent lawyer.

“From the day Larry was born until the day my father died, they were antagonists,” Arthur Kramer told Vanity Fair in 1992.

In “The Normal Heart,” Arthur Kramer is represented by the character Ben Weeks, a man with ambivalent feelings about his brother’s homosexuality.

Arthur gave $1 million to Yale in 2001 to establish the Larry Kramer Initiative for Lesbian and Gay Studies, and his law firm became active in pro bono work for causes like same-sex marriage.

Larry Kramer himself married his partner, Mr.

He got into AIDS work in the summer of 1981 after reading an article about deadly cases of a rare cancer, Kaposi’s sarcoma, among young gay men.

“By the play’s end,” Ben Brantley of The New York Times wrote in his review, “even people who think they have no patience for polemical theater may find their resistance has melted into tears.

Kramer had long suspected: He was carrying the virus that causes AIDS.

“A new fear has now joined my daily repertoire of emotions, and my nighttime ones, too,” he wrote in the afterword to a later edition of his 1989 book, “Reports From the Holocaust: The Making of an AIDS Activist.” “But life has also become exceptionally more precious and, ironically, I am happier.”.

Kramer wrote, it was a revelation even to him: “The father I’d hated became someone sad to me; and the mother I’d adored became a little less adorable, and no less sad.”.

At the same time, he had been working on a mammoth project, a historical novel called “The American People,” by which he meant the gay American people — a central tenet of which was that many of the country’s historically important figures, including George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, had had homosexual relationships.

The reviews for “The American People, Volume 1: Search for My Heart” were not kind.

Kramer told The Times in 2017

“Most people seemed to review me, not the book: Loudmouth activist Larry Kramer has written a loudmouth book.”

“The American People, Volume 2: The Brutality of Fact,” whose protagonist was based on Mr