August Wilson, 60, one of America's greatest playwrights, died overnight in Seattle.

Michelle McLoughlin, Associated Press August Wilson, right, talked with actor Anthony Chisholm during rehearsal of Wilson's play "Radio Golf" at Yale University in New Haven, Conn., in April. Wilson returned to Yale to complete this final work in his series of plays he began there chronicling the black experience in 20th- century America. Click photo for larger image. Related coverage Visit our special index to learn more about August Wilson, his cycle of plays and his connection to Western Pennsylvania: "An August heritage / August Wilson and The Pittsburgh Cycle"

Last December, Pittsburgh-born playwright August Wilson's thoughts turned to mortality. With his 60th birthday coming up on April 27, he said, "There's more [life] behind me than ahead. I think of dying every day. At a certain age, you should be prepared to go at any time."

In May, he was diagnosed with liver cancer and in June his doctors determined it was inoperable. But in August he showed that he was indeed prepared, telling the Post-Gazette, "I've lived a blessed life. I'm ready."

The end came overnight when Mr. Wilson died at Swedish Hospital in Seattle, surrounded by his family, said Dena Levitin, Wilson's personal assistant.

In August, Mr. Wilson took a characteristically wry look at his fate, saying, "It's not like poker; you can't throw your hand in." He also noted that when his long-time friend and producer, Benjamin Mordecai, the only person to work with him on all 10 of his major plays, died this spring, the New York Times obituary included a picture of him and Mordecai together. "That's what gave God this idea," he said.

The fierce poignancy of his eulogy for Mordecai in September's American Theatre magazine sounds self-reflexive: "How do we transform loss? ... Time's healing balm is essentially a hoax. ... Haunted by the specter of my own death, I find solace in Ben's life."

Mr. Wilson also said in August, "I'm glad I finished the cycle," referring to the unprecedented series of 10 plays with which he conquered the American theater. In the process, he opened new avenues for black artists, changed the way theater approaches race and changed the business of theater, too.

Often called the Pittsburgh Cycle because all but one play is set in the Hill District of Pittsburgh where Mr. Wilson spent his youth and early adulthood, this unequaled epic chronicles the tragedies and aspirations of African Americans in a play set in each decade of the 20th century.

In dramatizing the glory, anger, promise and frustration of being black in America, he created a world of the imagination. August Wilson's Hill District came to rank with such other transformational fictional worlds as Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha, Hardy's Wessex or Friel's Donegal.

Critics from Manhattan to Los Angeles now speak knowingly of "Pittsburgh's Hill District," not just the Hill as it is now or was when Mr. Wilson grew up in the '50s, but as August Wilson Country -- the archetypal northern urban black neighborhood, a construct of frustration, nostalgia, anger and dream. Mr. Wilson's plays present this world as a crucible in which the identity of black America has been shaped.

The final play in the cycle, set in the final decade, is "Radio Golf." It premiered in March at New Haven's Yale Repertory Theatre, where the earlier plays in the cycle were first produced in the 1980s.

Even while suffering from cancer and recovering from a small stroke, Mr. Wilson kept re-writing for the play's second production at Los Angeles' Mark Taper Forum, July 31-Sept. 18.

Funeral arrangements are pending.

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More details in tomorrow's Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.