Biographies tend to focus on the high points of a person's life - and for Wendy Wasserstein, 1989 was Mount Everest.

That year, Wasserstein won the Tony Award, the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize and the Pulitzer Prize (what a hockey fan might call "the hat trick") for her play "The Heidi Chronicles." Perhaps even more of an affirmation was that it ran for 622 performances on Broadway.

Still, it was for the long run, the full body of her work, that Wasserstein was remembered and praised after her death from lymphoma in 2006. The New York Times obituary noted:

"Starting in 1977 with her breakthrough work, "Uncommon Women and Others," Ms. Wasserstein's plays struck a profound chord with women struggling to reconcile a desire for romance and companionship, drummed into baby boomers by the seductive fantasies of Hollywood movies, with the need for intellectual independence and achievement separate from the personal sphere."

Wasserstein fought that stereotype her entire working life, and so did her characters. Again, the New York Times:

"Her heroines - intelligent and successful but also riddled with self-doubt - sought enduring love a little ambivalently, but they didn't always find it, and their hard-earned sense of self-worth was often shadowed by the frustrating knowledge that American women's lives continued to be measured by their success at capturing the right man. Ms. Wasserstein drew on her own experience as a smart, well-educated, funny Manhattanite who wasn't particularly lucky in romance to create heroines in a similar mold, women who embraced the essential tenets of the feminist movement but didn't have the stomach for stridency."

Yet Wasserstein was not a dour, angry crusader, either.

"When I think of Wendy Wasserstein," wrote Village Voice drama critic Michael Feingold, "I hear hear her giggling."

Wasserstein was born Oct. 18, 1950 in New York City, the daughter of a well-to-do textile executive and a former dancer who had immigrated from Poland. She graduated from Yale and then returned to New York to plunge into her career. "Uncommon Women" and others made her a success early on, a play about three Mount Holyoke College alumna that later became a TV movie with Glenn Close, Swoosie Kurtz and Meryl Streep in the title roles.

"The Heidi Chronicles" used the main character, an art historian, to delve into changes in the basic relationship between men and women during the 1960s and 1970s.

After years of taking fertility drugs, Wasserstein finally had a child - a daughter named Lucy Jane - at the age of 48.

She also taught at Cornell, where she was the Andrew Dickson White Professor at Large.