Eppie Lederer, who as the syndicated columnist Ann Landers was widely considered responsible for bringing the advice column into the modern era, died yesterday at her home in Chicago. She was 83.

The cause was multiple myeloma, a cancer of the bone marrow, her family said.

Mrs. Lederer, who became Ann Landers in 1955, avoided the quavering prose and Victorian euphemism of an earlier generation of newspaper sob sisters in favor of hard-nosed, often witty, discussion of contemporary woes that, as she liked to say, ''would twirl your turban.''

She advised millions of readers on problems ranging from acne to alcoholism to AIDS, often in spirited competition with her identical twin sister, who wrote the advice column Dear Abby.

At the time of Mrs. Lederer's death, her column was carried in more than 1,200 newspapers around the world, with a readership of 90 million, according to Creators Syndicate, her distributor. A 1978 World Almanac survey named her the most influential woman in the United States.

''I would rather have my column on a thousand refrigerator doors than win a Pulitzer,'' she once said.

A petite, elegant woman who favored high heels and silk, Mrs. Lederer had delicate features and a voice of pure ground glass.

An ardent liberal on most social issues, she was deeply traditional in matters of personal morality.

She never smoked or drank alcohol, and remained, in her words, a ''nice Jewish girl from Sioux City, Iowa,'' whose public expressions of annoyance never got much stronger than ''Oh, banana oil!''

But decades spent advising Nervous in Nevada and Desperate in Denver did not make Mrs. Lederer immune to personal foibles, and she occasionally appeared to need a dose of her own counsel on such matters as public discretion, divorce and her highly visible rivalry with her sister.

Mrs. Lederer was born Esther Pauline Friedman in Sioux City on July 4, 1918, the third of four daughters of Abraham and Rebecca Friedman.

Her twin sister, Pauline Esther, known as Popo, followed 17 minutes afterward, just as she would later follow her into the advice business.

The girls' father was an immigrant from Vladivostok, Russia, who made his start in America selling chickens from a wagon and, in the classic New World success story, wound up owning movie theaters in three states.

''I owe a lot to my parents and to my Iowa heritage,'' Mrs. Lederer said in an interview with her flagship newspaper, The Chicago Tribune, in 1996. ''I think that middle American values have helped me tremendously -- the principles, the morality.''

Jules's Wife to Ann Landers

In their youth, the vivacious, dark-haired Friedman twins were inseparable. Both entered Morningside College in Sioux City, where Eppie, as she said afterward, ''majored in boys.''

She left in 1939, after three and a half years, to marry Jules W. Lederer, a hat salesman who later formed the Budget Rent-a-Car Corporation. Eppie was wed in a double ceremony alongside Popo.

The new Mrs. Lederer moved to Eau Claire, Wis., where she became active in Democratic politics, winning the county party chairmanship.

In 1955, the Lederers moved to Chicago. By now Mrs. Lederer was an affluent housewife and the mother of a daughter. She was deeply invested in being married, so much so that she had the words ''Jules's Wife'' stitched into the linings of her fur coats.

The Chicago Democratic machine would not have her (''We don't need any more hell raisers,'' she recalled being told), and Mrs. Lederer cast about for something else as an outlet for her boundless energy.

She noticed an advice column in The Chicago Sun-Times called Ask Ann Landers.

''I thought it was a good column, but not great,'' Mrs. Lederer recalled in a 1990 interview. ''When I read it, I would cover up her answers and think about what I would have said if I had been Ann Landers.''

On an impulse, she called a friend who was a Sun-Times executive and asked whether she could help the advice columnist answer some of her mail. The timing was serendipitous. It turned out that the columnist, a nurse named Ruth Crowley, had died the week before, and the paper was holding a contest among 28 of the women at The Sun-Times to find a new Ann Landers. Mrs. Lederer, who had never held a paying job or written a word for publication, became the 29th contestant.

She was given a stack of letters and asked to answer them. The first was from a woman who owned a walnut tree that was dropping nuts into her next-door neighbor's yard. A fight had erupted over who owned the fallen nuts.

''I knew this was a legal question, and I began to wonder how high up in legal circles I could go for the answer to impress the contest judges,'' Mrs. Lederer recalled in 1990.

Deciding to settle only for the best, she called up Justice William O. Douglas of the Supreme Court, a friend from her Democratic Party days. The answer, he said, was that the neighbor could do anything with the nuts but sell them.

For the next letter, from a Roman Catholic who wanted to marry a Protestant, Mrs. Lederer sought the counsel of another old friend, the Rev. Theodore M. Hesburgh, the president of Notre Dame. She answered the rest of the mail in similar fashion, drawing on experts in her powerful social circle.

When Mrs. Lederer brought the letters back to The Sun-Times, as she later recalled, the contest editor was horrified to see so many prominent figures in her answers. ''You can't use these people's names,'' he told her. ''They'll sue us!''

Mrs. Lederer assured him she really knew those people, and they had given their permission.

The editor looked at her. ''How long do you think you can keep this up?'' he asked.

She replied, ''I think I can keep it up for quite a while.''

A few days later Mrs. Lederer's telephone rang. ''Good morning, Ann Landers,'' said The Sun-Times's publisher, Marshall Field IV.

Tackling a 1950's Taboo

Where earlier lovelorn columnists like Dorothy Dix had given measured, modest replies to discreet questions about courtship, the new Ann Landers was a wisecracking tough cookie out of Damon Runyon. She addressed correspondents as ''Buster,'' ''Honey'' and ''Bub,'' admonishing them to ''kwitcherbellyachin' '' over trivial complaints. Husbands distressed by wifely inattention were reassured, ''Many are cold, but few are frozen.'' Once a Miss Icarus wrote saying she wanted to marry her fiancé's father. Mrs. Lederer's reply: ''Drop Daedalus.'' The column was an immediate success, and quickly went into syndication.

In those gentler times, much of the mail was about the miseries of pimples and the mores of going steady. ''A lemon squeezed too many times is considered garbage,'' Mrs. Lederer admonished one 1950's teenager who inquired about petting.

But even then, Mrs. Lederer discussed more controversial issues. During her first year she responded to a letter about homosexuality, taboo advice-column fare in the 1950's. The paper in St. Joseph, Mich., refused to print the column; the publisher told her he planned to run an announcement on Page 1 that the column would not be appearing that day because the subject matter was unfit for a family newspaper.

''I called the publisher up and said, 'This is a human problem, and that is what I do,' '' she told The New Yorker in a 1995 interview. The publisher held firm.

''I said: 'Fine. Then everyone in St. Joe is going to buy The Detroit Free Press to see what you won't print.' I called The Free Press and told them to get ready for a lot of extra sales.

''From then on, boy,'' she added, ''that St. Joe paper printed every damn word I wrote.''

Early in her newfound career, Mrs. Lederer often phoned her twin sister, Pauline Phillips, for help with her replies. Mrs. Phillips, who lived in California, proved so good at coming up with pithy one-liners that within a few months she began writing her own advice column in The San Francisco Chronicle under the name Abigail Van Buren. As Dear Abby battled Ann Landers in syndication, a bitter rivalry between the authors ensued. The sisters reconciled after not speaking for five years.

800 Letters in 2 Hours

When she was not padding around the Sun-Times newsroom in her stocking feet or sifting through the mail in her pink office at the paper, Mrs. Lederer worked at home, a vast apartment boasting commanding views of Lake Michigan and filled with works by Picasso, Dali and Renoir. There, Mrs. Lederer, who left The Sun-Times for the rival Chicago Tribune in 1987, read the several hundred letters winnowed for her each day by her staff, often working until 2 a.m.

She was partial to working in the bath, propping the mail on a marble shelf in the tub, tapping out the replies afterward on her I.B.M. Selectric typewriter. She could go through 800 letters, she said, in the course of a two-hour soak.

''I'm free, the price is right and they can be anonymous,'' she once said of her correspondents. ''They feel they know me.''

Her office, which by the 1990's was receiving 2,000 letters a day, functioned as a de facto clearing house for people in need, maintaining computerized lists of support groups and social service agencies in hundreds of cities.

''I can't salvage a life that's been rotten for 20 years in a little bit of newspaper space,'' Mrs. Lederer told The New York Times Magazine in 1974. But, she added, ''We know exactly where to send people for every imaginable problem.''

In her role as Ann Landers, Mrs. Lederer was an outspoken advocate for several causes. Although she staunchly opposed United States involvement in Southeast Asia (''I never could do a thing with Lyndon Johnson,'' she once said ruefully), she visited Vietnam in 1967 as a gesture of goodwill to American troops there.

In 1971, she wrote about a bill awaiting the president's signature that would allocate $100 million for cancer research. She asked readers to clip the column and send it to Washington. Buried under a million columns, President Richard Nixon signed the National Cancer Act.

In 1975, Mrs. Lederer underwent what she would call her ''only troubled time'' when her husband left her for another woman. She made the decision to disclose in her column that Ann Landers, who until the early 1970's continued to advise couples to stay together for the sake of the children, was getting a divorce herself.

She wrote a shorter column than usual, asking newspaper editors to preserve the white space at the bottom as a memorial to ''one of the world's best marriages that didn't make it to the finish line.''

Mr. Lederer died in 1999. In addition to her sister, Mrs. Phillips, Mrs. Lederer is survived by her daughter, Margo Howard, of Cambridge, Mass.; three grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.

Fans and Powerful Enemies

After the column on her divorce, she received more than 35,000 letters of encouragement from readers, had the linings removed from her fur coats, and kept on going.

''A divorce,'' she once said, ''is nothing compared with the problems I see in my everyday mail.''

Although those problems would progress from Saturday-night dating woes to late-20th-century ills like domestic violence and crack, Mrs. Lederer was sometimes astonished to discover the everyday things that could inflame the passions of her readers.

She once threw her column open to a discussion of whether toilet paper should be hung with the free end coming over or under the roll; 15,000 letters later, Mrs. Lederer (herself in the ''under'' camp) had to call a moratorium on further debate.

Occasionally Mrs. Lederer's work was the source of public embarrassment. In 1982, she admitted to having recycled 15-year-old letters for use in a number of current columns. In 1993 she was discovered to have embellished a letter about fraudulent charities by adding condemnatory remarks of her own.

And a 1995 interview with The New Yorker in which she called Pope John Paul II ''a Polack'' drew widespread criticism.

She apologized for the incidents in print, resolving to do her customary penance, ''40 lashes with a wet noodle.''

And while her column made Mrs. Lederer powerful friends, from prominent educators and executives to presidents, it also brought her bitter enemies.

Among her detractors were the National Rifle Association, which opposed her advocacy of gun control; groups opposing abortion, which deplored her abortion-rights position; and animal-rights organizations, angered by her support for the use of animals in medical research.

''Those three groups really despise me, and I'm very proud of it,'' she said in 1993.

All in all, she said, being Ann Landers proved far more involving -- and more gratifying -- than she could ever have anticipated when she brought home her first stack of letters in 1955.

''I cannot imagine a career that could be more rewarding,'' Mrs. Lederer said in a 1990 interview. ''There is enormous satisfaction in knowing that I've been able to touch the lives of millions of people. Where does anybody get a job like this?''

Mrs. Lederer, who owned the rights to the Ann Landers name, often said she did not expect anyone to replace her after her death. There would be no newspaper contest, no tales of disputed walnuts. ''There will never be another Ann Landers,'' she told The New Yorker. ''When I go, the column goes with me.''

Esther P Lederer