In the years before a stroke affected his writer's command of language, Tad Mosel would spend weeks preparing lectures at Havenwood and Heritage Heights. The Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright's periodic talks were a highlight for the retirement communities and would showcase his insider's perspective on art, theater and writing.

Now Mosel, who died from esophageal cancer Sunday morning, will live on in a space for future speakers. His $100,000 gift to the Havenwood-Heritage Heights campuses will help finance a new auditorium, Tad's Place.

Mosel, who was 86, was born in Ohio and spent most of his life in New York City, where he fell in love with the theater and completed a prolific career writing dozens of teleplay scripts, several Broadway dramas and the biography of Katharine Cornell, a stage actress who moved him from a young age.

But his last years were spent in Concord. He moved here with his longtime partner, Raymond Tatra, 18 years ago and fell in love with the community, befriending his neighbors, his accountant, his barber and a waitress at his favorite Windmill Restaurant, all friends who visited him in his final days.

He was well-known in Havenwood-Heritage Heights for his friendly manner, his dry sense of humor and the faintest whiff of fame. Residents and employees would often mention to visitors that their retirement community boasted a Pulitzer Prize winner. And his talks, reserved for residents, were big events on campus.

"When he had a program, he packed a room and no one ever wanted to leave," said Sue Buxton, the community's vice president of health and support services. "He would hold them in the dining room at Heritage Heights and at the auditorium at Havenwood. He always wanted to do them on both campuses because everyone wanted to go."

Mosel began writing teleplays for live Sunday productions in 1949, just as the medium was becoming mainstream. In a 2003 interview on New Hampshire Public Radio, he said television was uncharted territory at the time: No one knew the rules, and none of the old writers saw any glamour in the business.

"It was vast. It was empty. It was uninhabited. It was full of danger. It was full of surprises. And nobody knew what to do with it," he said. That uncertainty left the writing jobs open to greenhorns like Mosel.

Television ended up being a great venue for Mosel. He wrote more than 100 teleplays during what became known as the Golden Age of Television and worked with many of the great actors of his time, including Paul Newman, Henry Fonda and Eileen Heckart.

"You could get anything on the air if you wrote it well," Mosel said in the radio interview.

Television also gave Mosel experience and contacts that allowed him to begin writing for the theater and for film. He had attended the Yale School of Drama and Columbia University, where a professor told him the play he submitted as a thesis was no good and he could not earn his master's degree. Several years later, faculty apologized to the then-famous Mosel and Columbia gave him the degree.

He received the Pulitzer Prize in drama in 1961 for All The Way Home, an adaptation of James Agee's novel, A Death in the Family. The play, starring Colleen Dewhurst, Lillian Gish and Arthur Hill, was directed by Arthur Penn. The play was critically acclaimed and ran for 333 shows on Broadway. Mosel later adapted the show for television. Concord Community Players produced the show in 2004.

Mosel received honorary doctorates from Kenyon College and the College of Wooster in Ohio. He taught dramatic writing at six universities, including Yale, New York University and the University of Pennsylvania.

Mosel was born George Mosel in 1922, but his father nicknamed him Tad, and the name stuck. According to Mosel's close friend, Ted Walch, Mosel tried to use the name George on his first scripts but said it just didn't look right.

Like many in his family, Mosel went to Amherst College but left to serve in the Army during World War II. He finished college and his graduate studies on the GI Bill.