Last December, Pittsburgh-born playwright August Wilson's thoughts turned to mortality. With his 60th birthday approaching, 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."

Bill Wade, Post-Gazette Playwright August Wilson in the Hill District in front of the New Granada theater in 1999, when his play "King Hedley II" opened the Pittsburgh Public Theater's new O'Reilly Theater. The play is set in 1985 in the Hill District, where Wilson grew up. Click photo for larger image. More about August Wilson The Pittsburgh Cycle of plays Timeline: 1945-2005 August Wilson Photo Journal Index of Post-Gazette coverage of August Wilson, dating to 1997

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

The end came yesterday morning when Mr. Wilson, 60, died in Swedish Medical Center in Seattle, "surrounded by his loved ones," said Dena Levitin, his assistant.

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 obituary in The New York Times included a picture of him and Mordecai together. "That's what gave God this idea," he said.

The fierce poignancy of his eulogy for Mr. Mordecai in a recent 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 told the Post-Gazette 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 -- 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 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 -- the last written, 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.

There is talk of staging "Radio Golf" later this season on Broadway, where it would be a living memorial along with the August Wilson Theatre, formerly the Virginia, which will be formally re-named on Oct. 17.

That is just one of many honors extended to Mr. Wilson since it was learned he was dying. Many have been testimonies to the personal impact the dramatic resonance he has found in the African-American life has had on black and white alike.

"While his death was not unexpected, it's a serious blow to the entire theatrical community in the United States and Pittsburgh in particular," said Ted Pappas, artistic and executive director of the Pittsburgh Public Theater, which has staged most of Wilson's work. "August Wilson is one of the seminal figures of 20th century dramatic art. When we speak of Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, we will now add the name of August Wilson to that pantheon."

August Wilson was born Frederick August Kittel on April 27, 1945; his family long called him Freddy. His mother, Daisy Wilson, whose own mother had walked north from North Carolina, raised her six children in a cold-water flat behind Bella's grocery on Bedford Avenue in the Hill. She died of lung cancer in March 1983, just before her son's first great success on Broadway.

His father, also Frederick Kittel, was a German baker who died in 1965. "My father very rarely came around," Mr. Wilson said. "I grew up in my mother's household in a cultural environment which was black." He also had a stepfather, David Bedford, who died in 1969.

There were six children: his older sisters, Freda, Linda Jean, and Donna, and his younger brothers, Edwin and Richard, all of whom survive him. His brothers kept their father's name, but at 20, he signaled his cultural loyalty by taking his mother's, becoming August Wilson.

His sister Freda Ellis was attending St. Benedict the Moor Roman Catholic Church in the Hill District early yesterday afternoon when she learned of her brother's death.

"I knew he died in peace and that's some relief for me," Mrs. Ellis said. "They told me he just couldn't hold on any longer.

"Because our family was so poor, you had to work for anything you wanted, and August worked so hard to become a writer. He deserves the success and the notice because he did work so hard."

Although Mr. Wilson was not the oldest sibling, he was "the patriarch of the family," Mrs. Ellis said.

Mr. Wilson remembered that his mother "had a very hard time feeding us all. But I had a wonderful childhood. ... As a family, we did things together. We said the rosary every night at seven o'clock. We all sat down and had dinner at a certain time. ...We didn't have a TV, so we listened to the radio."

One of his mother's enduring gifts was to teach him to read when he was 4. Mr. Wilson called it transforming: "You can unlock information and you're better able to understand the forces that are oppressing you."

Years later he told a library celebration, "when I was 5 years old, I got my first library card from the Hill District branch on Wylie Avenue. Labor Historians do not speak well of Andrew Carnegie ... [but he] will forever be for me that man who made it all possible for me to be standing here today. ... I wore out my library card and cried when I lost it."

His mother also valued education, sending him to St. Richard's parochial school in the Hill, then to Central Catholic High School in Oakland. As the only black student in the school, he was constantly taunted and harassed, so he left just before the end of his freshman year.

He started the next year at Connelley Vo-Tech, which he found pointless, so he switched to Gladstone High School, just across the street from the Hazelwood home the family had moved to when he was 12. He was supposedly in the 10th grade but because he hadn't graduated from the 9th at Central, they had him taking 9th grade subjects. The work was well behind what he had already done, so he was bored and didn't work at it until he decided he wanted to get into the after-school college club run by one of the teachers.

It was that teacher who, in an often-told story, doubted he'd written a 20-page paper on Napoleon he submitted. Insulted, the future August Wilson dropped out of school at 15 and for a while didn't tell his mother.

"I dropped out of school, but I didn't drop out of life," he recalled. "I would leave the house each morning and go to the main branch of the Carnegie Library in Oakland where they had all the books in the world. ... I felt suddenly liberated from the constraints of a pre-arranged curriculum that labored through one book in eight months."

The other important part of his education came on the streets of the Hill. He once told an interviewer, "Pittsburgh is a very hard city, especially if you're black," and another, "when I was 22 years old, each day had to be continually negotiated. It was rough." As he memorably put it, "I grew up without a father. When I was 20, I went down onto Centre Avenue to learn from the community how to be a man."

That community provided many fathers -- the old men chatting in Pat's Place or on street corners; the inhabitants of the diners where Wilson sat and listened; like-minded friends with artistic inclinations. His true father was both the small community that nurtured him and the larger Pittsburgh that, by opposing, stimulated and defined.

He rented a room and worked at many jobs. He discovered the blues. He followed various black identity movements and fought for social justice. And he featured himself a poet, sitting in diners, scribbling on napkins.

"The exact day I became a poet was April 1, 1965, the day I bought my first typewriter," using $20 Freda paid him for writing a term paper for her on Robert Frost and Carl Sandburg.

Many years later he recalled, "The first time I became aware of theater was Pearl Bailey in 'Hello, Dolly,' around 1958, 1959. My mother was in New York and brought back the program, her first and only Broadway show."

In the late '60s, Mr. Wilson became part of a talented group of poets, educators and artists of the future, young men such as Rob Penny, Nick Flournoy and Chawley Williams, with regular haunts at the Halfway Art Gallery and the Hill Arts Society. Mr. Wilson remembered that "I always had a napkin and a pencil. That's one of the things about writing -- the tools are so simple."

He was involved in the debates of the '60s and continued to consider himself "a black nationalist and a cultural nationalist." He and his friends formed the Centre Avenue Poets Theater Workshop. Later, he and Mr. Penny started the Black Horizon Theater, which toured, and they were involved in the Kuntu Repertory Theater.

But Mr. Wilson's first brushes with theater had been off-putting. In 1965, he saw a 30-minute excerpt of "The Rhinoceros" at Fifth Avenue High School. "That was the first theater I recall, and I wasn't impressed." He met some of the actors in John Hancock's 1966 Pittsburgh Playhouse company, but he stayed for only 20 minutes of Bertolt Brecht's "A Man's a Man." It was 1976 before Mr. Wilson saw a whole, professional play, Athol Fugard's "Sizwe Bansi Is Dead," a comi-tragic account of life under apartheid at the Pittsburgh Public Theater.

But in 1968, Mr. Penny wrote a play and the Tulane Drama Review had a special issue on black theater. "That was the first time I'd seen black plays in print -- there hadn't been any plays on the Negro shelf at the library. So we did them all."

Mr. Wilson's first staged play was "Recycle," which drew on the unhappy 1972 termination of his 1969 marriage to Brenda Burton. (A happy result was their daughter, Sakina Ansari, born in 1970.) Two other one-act plays from this time are "Homecoming" and "The Coldest Day of the Year." Soon thereafter, his friend Claude Purdy moved to St. Paul to work with its black theater group, Penumbra, and he soon invited Mr. Wilson to join him.

In 1978, he went, taking with him a satirical play, "Black Bart and the Sacred Hills," adapted from his poems at Mr. Purdy's suggestion. They did a workshop of "Black Bart" in St. Paul, and Mr. Wilson stayed. In 1981 he was married for the second time, to Judy Oliver, a friend of Mr. Purdy's wife.

Mr. Wilson once explained that St. Paul and Seattle -- cool, northern, Scandinavian cities -- appealed to him precisely because of their unlikeness to Pittsburgh, allowing him to look back more intently at the true material of August Wilson Country, source of his rich stream of stories, characters, images and conflicts.

He called "Jitney," written in St. Paul in 1979, his first real play. He submitted it twice unsuccessfully to the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center's National Playwrights Conference, and it was staged in Pittsburgh by the small Allegheny Repertory Theater in 1982. He unsuccessfully submitted three other early plays to the O'Neill before "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom" was accepted.

At the O'Neill, Wilson met the artistic director, Lloyd Richards, dean of the Yale Drama School, head of the professional Yale Repertory Theater and director of the break-through Broadway staging 25 years earlier of the most influential modern black American play, Lorraine Hansberry's "A Raisin in the Sun."

It was a turning point in both lives. Mr. Richards was the artistic father and collaborator Mr. Wilson needed, an experienced director who taught him stagecraft and helped him learn to re-write. Mr. Wilson's plays were a gift to Mr. Richards, who went on to direct the first six from workshop to Broadway.

"Ma Rainey" went quickly from the O'Neill to its premiere at Yale Rep to Broadway. Then time sped up, often with one play in initial workshop, another on Broadway and a third midway from one point to the other, simultaneously.

In 1990, Mr. Wilson's second marriage ended and he moved to Seattle. In 1994, he married Constanza Romero, a costume designer -- his third marriage, one in each of his three home cities -- and together they had a daughter, Azula Carmen Wilson, in 1997.

Even as a nonresident, Mr. Wilson remained a good Pittsburgh citizen, visiting frequently to see his family and friends. On several occasions, such as the 1988 Carnegie Institute Man and Ideas series, 1992 University of Pittsburgh Honors Convocation and 2000 Heinz Lecture Series, he delivered uplifting but accusatory addresses about the black position in American history and culture, talking across the great national racial divide with prophetic force.

He also came to praise, as at the 1998 "Affirmation of the Blues," a benefit for Community Media at the Carnegie Lecture Hall. Woven out of a love of African-American community and art, it was shot through with threads of reminiscence over shared early struggles and joys. Honored with him that night were such "elders" as Billy Jackson of Community Media and Kuntu Repertory founder Vernell Lillie, who remembered Mr. Wilson yesterday as "a brilliant director and poet -- a gentle, creative man who loved the arts."

He also came back to Pittsburgh to work. He was resident at the Pittsburgh Public Theater in 1996 to revise "Jitney" for its professional debut, and again in 1999 to prepare the premiere of "King Hedley II," which had the honor of opening the new $20 million O'Reilly Theater in the Cultural District.

In 1994, he was here to co-produce the filming of "The Piano Lesson" for television, the only one of his plays so far to make it to the screen. He even came to speak of the beauty of this city which he had not always loved. In 1994, he said, "Like most people, I have this sort of love-hate relationship with Pittsburgh. This is my home and at times I miss it and find it tremendously exciting, and other times I want to catch the first thing out that has wheels."

He had come back for six weeks earlier that year, he said, "to reconnect with Pittsburgh, do some writing here -- this is fertile ground." The city remained the deep well of memory into which he kept dipping the ladle of his art.

His most popular play, "Fences," was long ago optioned for film, but Mr. Wilson insisted on a black director of his choice and although he wrote several screenplays, the project is still in the offing.

But on stage, his clout is great. With his one Tony, two Pulitzers, three American Theatre Critics awards and seven New York Drama Critics Circle Awards, he has become the flagship of contemporary black theater. In a roundtable discussion among four black playwrights in 1999, Marion McClinton said, "When theaters make money on August Wilson they might say, 'Let's do two [black plays] next year.'"

In 1996, he took on a spokesman role, proclaiming his protest against the marginalization of black theater in a keynote address at the annual convention of professional regional theaters. This led to his very public dispute with critic/producer Robert Brustein, culminating in their January 1997 public debate in New York City that put theater back at the center of the national debate about race and culture.

He was surprised to be called "rich" in a New Yorker profile, but agreed he was not poor. If you invested $1 in August Wilson in 1984, when "Ma Rainey" hit Broadway, he said, "You'd have gotten it back and maybe 40 cents more."

His awards were many, including more than two dozen honorary doctorates (from the University of Pittsburgh among others), Rockefeller and Guggenheim Fellowships, a National Humanities Medal, the 2003 Heinz Award in Humanities and Arts and the only high school diploma issued by the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh. He was a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

He also anchored his own achievements in his heritage. At the Pittsburgher of the Year ceremony in 1990, he said:

"I was born in Pittsburgh in 1945 and for 33 years stumbled through its streets, small, narrow, crooked, cobbled, with the weight of the buildings pressing in on me and my spirit pushed into terrifying contractions. That I would stand before you today in this guise was beyond comprehension ... . I am standing here in my grandfather's shoes. ... They are the shoes of a whole generation of men who left a life of unspeakable horror in the South and came North ... searching for jobs, for the opportunity to live a life with dignity and whatever eloquence the heart could call upon. ... The cities were not then, and are not now, hospitable. There is a struggle to maintain one's dignity. But that generation of men and women stands as a testament to the resiliency of the human spirit. And they have passed on to us, their grandchildren, the greatest of gifts, the gift of hope refreshened."

Asked for his own greatest accomplishment, he said he would like to be known as "the guy who wrote these 10 plays."

More specifically, "after I wrote Loomis' speech [in 'Joe Turner'] about seeing the bones" on the track of the Atlantic route of the slaver-traders, "I thought, as an artist, right there, I'd be satisfied."

Burial and service arrangements are pending.