The acclaimed playwright August Wilson, whose landmark cycle of plays gave powerful voice to the African-American experience in the 20th century, died in a Seattle Hospital last week.

Diagnosed with liver cancer earlier this year, he announced in late August that the cancer was inoperable. He was 60.

Wilson's plays, often compared to the work of Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, brought to the stage a marriage of deep lyricism and rich narrative, and always performed fierce moral interrogation upon their memorable cast of characters; their mothers and daughters, their fathers and sons, their cab-drivers and jazz musicians, their freed slaves and ex-cons.

Inspired by the rhythms and resonances of blues music, the plays of the 10-part cycle were resisted by some critics for their occasional journeys into the supernatural, but welcomed by most for the illumination and integrity they offered amid the lights of commercialism on Broadway.

Of the plays - in order of decades in which they were set, Gem of the Ocean, Joe Turner's Come and Gone, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, The Piano Lesson, Seven Guitars, Fences, Two Trains Running, Jitney, King Hedley II and Radio Golf - only Jitney, the first to be written, was not produced on Broadway. Each of the others was nominated for a Tony Award for best play, with 1987's Fences winning both that award and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

Fences was Wilson's most popular play, grossing $11 million in a single year (a record for a non-musical Broadway show). It depicted a fallen baseball hero confronting his son; The Piano Lesson, which won him a second Pulitzer in 1990, concerned a struggle over the fate of a family heirloom. Through each of the plays, certain characters recur; Wilson described the figure of Aunt Esther as the mother of all of his characters, and as being as old as African -America itself.

His plays are generally set in the Hill District of Pittsburgh, and it was here he was born Frederick August Kittel, on April 27th, 1945. His father, a baker, was a German immigrant, and it was upon his death in 1965 that his son changed his own name to August Wilson, taking the surname of his African- American mother. He began writing in the same year, when he used the $20 earned by writing a school paper for his sister to buy a typewriter.

Wilson, who dropped out of high school as a teenager, but spent much time reading at the public library, described the experience of carrying the typewriter home, placing it on the kitchen table, and declaring himself a writer. It was only then, he added, that he remembered his inability to type. He persevered, but wrote poetry at first, submitting to Harper's and working at odd jobs for money, and did not turn to plays until some years later, even though he co-founded the Black Horizons Theater in Pittsburgh in 1968.

He moved to Minnesota in 1978, and wrote Jitney over the course of 10 days in a St Paul fish-and-chip shop the next year. His next play, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (1984), established his reputation.

Wilson became as controversial as he was celebrated through his blunt statements on race and theatre. In 1996, he used the keynote address of a national theatre conference to speak out against what he saw as a racist imbalance in non-profit theatre, to call for a new black theatre and to criticise non-traditional casting. Miller's Death of a Salesman, he argued, ought never to be played by a black cast. These comments sparked a heated and long-running debate with the critic Robert Brustein. Wilson stood his ground, later insisting publicly that the film version of Fences could not be made unless it was directed by a black director, arguing that this was needed not because of race but because of culture. The film went unmade.

Though his plays showed on Broadway, he moved in 1994 not to New York but to Seattle, remaining at a distance from the hubbub of the theatre scene; he was known as an intensely quiet and reflective man - standing alone outside a theatre after opening night, smoking, with his porter's cap pulled down over his brow - who had more time for talking with young and aspiring writers than he had for the trappings of success - he resisted several offers from Hollywood - or even for the activity of theatre-going itself.

Still, he was happy with the news, announced this summer, that Broadway's Virginia Theatre was to be re-named in his honour - becoming the first Broadway house to be called after an African-American - and hoped to be well enough to attend the unveiling. Instead, the marquees of Broadway dimmed in his honour on October 4th, and the marquee of the August Wilson Theatre will open next week. He is survived by his third wife and two daughters.