The condition that is most common to writers is that of exile, both mentally and geographically. The list of examples is as long as it is splendid: Richard Wright, James Joyce, Vladimir Nabokov, Hannah Arendt, Salman Rushdie, and our very own Jonathan Raban. Also one of our own, August Wilson is the most celebrated black playwright in the history of American theater, and the leading figure of black letters after Toni Morrison, who succeeded James Baldwin (another writer who lived in exile). Wilson, a mental Pittsburghian and physical Seattleite, died at Swedish Hospital on Sunday, October 2. Liver cancer ended his life at 60.

Mostly set in the Hill District, the black side of Pittsburgh, Wilson's plays had a force, an energy that was black American to the core. There was nothing white, or European, in the language, themes, or content of his work. Before I met him in person, I had imagined that, like Toni Cade Bambara, he resided in the blackest of all American neighborhoods, and that his life was one of constant exposure to the living words and worlds of black English. Then I discovered he lived here, in Seattle (a city whose blacks barely make up 10 percent of the population). Odder yet, Wilson didn't live in the black (or blacker) neighborhoods, like the Central District or Rainier Valley, but on utterly white Capitol Hill. Nor did he spend his time in black restaurants or cafes, but in predominantly white establishments like Victrola Coffee & Art and the Canterbury Ale & Eats, where I often observed him eating fried foods and smoking cigarettes. The man amazed me.

This is what I frequently witnessed in the Canterbury: There's little or no black English for miles around, the music playing on the jukebox is hardcore white rock, a crowd of young white hipsters are talking their white hipster talk, and in the middle of all this unremitting whiteness, there is August Wilson, his facial expression reflecting a mind deep in thought, a mind that's steadily processing an internal polyphony of black voices into some of the most beautiful black poetry in the 200-year history of African-American letters. Wilson usually sat alone, by the window, eating quietly—his head (invariably covered by a flat cap) an island supporting a black community that was certainly much larger than the one in Seattle.

I very much wanted to ask Wilson how this was possible. How did his art survive in this environment? What nourished its radical exile? But I lacked the courage to bring the question out into the open and instead asked him—during a party for a movie in which he had a small role as a German philosopher and I a small role as a gay priest—why he moved to Seattle in the first place. I can't recall his exact response, but he said something about coming here in the dead of night... it raining a lot during the following month... the rain stopping one day... and him staying for good.

charles@thestranger.com