Playwright Lanford Wilson, 73

“Many of Wilson’s highly regarded plays” – Balm in Gilead, The Hot L Baltimore, Burn This – “probed the lives of lost, urban souls. Many of Wilson’s characters were desperate eccentrics whose fears and needs were invariably drawn with sympathy. But Wilson always seemed the most comfortable and revelatory when writing dramas set within a few hours’ drive of the Ozarks, the region of his birth.”