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Richard G. Stern, whose novels, short stories and essays were almost universally admired in the literary world but whose name remained stubbornly unrecognized in the wider world of readers, earning him a reputation for being, as one reviewer put it, "the best American author of whom you have never heard," died on Thursday at his home on Tybee Island, Ga. He was 84.

The cause was cancer, said his wife, Alane Rollings.

Mr. Stern wrote more than 20 books of fiction and nonfiction, mostly while teaching literature and creative writing at the University of Chicago. There he was at the center of a writerly cohort that included Philip Roth and Saul Bellow, and his classroom became a showcase for visiting literary eminences.

"He was an inspiring figure as a literature professor and an ace of great virtuosity as a novelist, short story writer, essayist and raconteur," Mr. Roth said in a telephone interview on Thursday. He added: "I was faculty, but I used to go to his class and sit at the back. It was there I met Bellow. It was there I met Lowell and Berryman and Mailer."

Mr. Roth recalled an afternoon in the mid-1950s when he and Mr. Stern were having lunch.

"I began telling him the story of how I spent my previous summer in New Jersey," Mr. Roth said. "And he said, 'Write it down.' I said, 'What?' He said, 'Write it down.' And that was 'Goodbye, Columbus' " — the title novella of Mr. Roth's first book.

Perhaps Mr. Stern's best known novel is "Other Men's Daughters" (1973), a drama, drawn from his own life, about a love affair between a middle-aged married man and a younger woman. Recognizing the theme as well worn, the critic Jonathan Yardley nonetheless wrote in The Washington Post Book World, "I cannot recall its being treated elsewhere in recent fiction with more fidelity to and understanding of the truths of separation, divorce and readjustment."

Generally, Mr. Stern's subject was the inner life of educated people and his strength examining intra-family relations. His prose was dense but not difficult, erudite but not pretentious; as an observer of human behavior he was both ruthless and generous, acknowledging characters' finer attributes but homing in on their foibles. He could be seen as a comic novelist, if a dark one.

"One of the reasons he never became famous — he was most famous among famous writers — was that his tone was hard to grasp, and some readers didn't feel morally settled," Mr. Roth said, "not because he was difficult or abstruse but because he was generous to all his characters. And that befuddled them."

In the 1986 novel "A Father's Words," for example, the narrator, Cy Riemer, the editor of a science newsletter and the divorced father of three, observes his daughter Livy in a passage that reveals both characters:

"Self-knowledge is her line. It's her problem as well. She doesn't understand her own gifts, her charm, her decency. As for me, she overrates my knowledge and underrates my selfishness. What others consider a virtue, she dismisses. 'Why are you so anxious to know about things?' she asks. 'You're going to run across the street to gawk at some historical marker and be hit by a truck. What's the difference where a treaty was signed? Or where some poet laid his cousin? You know more about Darwin and Rilke than you do about yourself.' Riemers are athletes of the mouth. Gab is our sport. We'll say anything to make a rhetorical point. (Witness this triple version of saying we talk a lot.)"

Mr. Stern's admirers have included Anthony Burgess, Flannery O'Connor, Thomas Berger and Richard Ellmann.

In 1985, Mr. Stern received the Medal of Merit for the Novel, awarded every six years by the Academy of Arts and Letters. Its winners have included Theodore Dreiser, Ernest Hemingway and Vladimir Nabokov.

"I never understood his obscurity," Mr. Roth said. "Every writer in America read and admired him."

Richard Gustave Stern was born in New York City on Feb. 25, 1928. His father, Henry, was a dentist, and though not bookish he was an avid storyteller, whom Mr. Stern credited with fostering his own desire to tell tales.

He began writing stories at age 12. After graduating from Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan, he attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, graduating in 1947. He got his master's degree at Harvard and Ph.D. from the University of Iowa. While at Iowa he published his first short story, in The Kenyon Review. Another early story, "The Sorrows of Captain Schreiber," won an O. Henry award as one of the best short stories of 1954.

After a year teaching at Connecticut College in New London, he landed at the University of Chicago in 1955 and remained there, as something of a legend, until his retirement in 2001.

"It's important at the University of Chicago, where the Great Works loom monumentally, to free students from the paralysis of intimidation by them," he wrote. "I don't hesitate to compare the best student work with the work of masters. This is not meant to cheapen the marvelous but to evoke it. The hope is to make students fall in love with sublimity and to show them it's not out of reach."

Mr. Stern's first book, the satirical "Golk" (1960), which centered on a TV show much like "Candid Camera," was one of the first serious novels to take aim at the oversized influence of television; his second, "Europe: Or Up and Down With Schreiber and Baggish" (1961), was a comic tale of two Americans, a down-and-out lawyer and a manipulative clerk, traveling in Europe.

Both were well-received as works by a writer with promise, though perhaps more memorable was his brief, caustic review in 1961 of "Catch-22" in The New York Times Book Review.

"Its author, Joseph Heller, is like a brilliant painter who decides to throw all the ideas in his sketchbooks onto one canvas, relying on their charm and shock to compensate for the lack of design," Mr. Stern wrote. The comment has often been quoted in discussions of how the novel came to be seen as a classic of 20th-century war fiction.

Mr. Stern's other novels include "Stitch" (1965), drawn from his experience as a Fulbright scholar in Europe and his acquaintanceship with the poet Ezra Pound, on whom the main character was based; and "Natural Shocks" (1978), which concerns a worldly journalist who accepts an assignment to write about death and becomes attached to a young woman dying of cancer.

Among his other books are the short story collections "Packages," (1980), "Noble Rot" (1988) and "Almonds to Zhoof" (2004); a collection of essays, "The Books in Fred Hampton's Apartment" (1973); and "A Sistermony," a memoir about his older sister, Ruth, and her death from cancer.

Mr. Stern's first marriage, to Gay Clark, ended in divorce. Besides Ms. Rollings, a poet, he is survived by four children from the earlier marriage — Christopher, Andrew, Nicholas and Kate — and five grandchildren.

Mr. Stern was well aware that he was more well-known in a small pool of writers than in the larger one of readers.

"I was a has-been before I'd been a been," he often said.