Harold Pinter, Nobel-winning playwright, dead at 78

Harold Pinter, one of the most influential playwrights of the 20th century, has died at the age of 78. Pinter, according to his wife Lady Antonia Fraser, , died Wednesday after a long battle with cancer. Not many writers live to see their names turned into an adjective, but the word ''Pinteresque'' was coined quite early to describe the menacing nature behind everyday situations and discourse. That element of Mr. Pinter's style was consistent from his earliest plays to his last. In between were such modern classics as ''The Birthday Party,'' ''The Caretaker,'' ''The Homecoming,'' and ''Betrayal.'' He was also a successful writer of screenplays and poetry, but these were corollaries to a theatrical body of work that was heavily influenced by Samuel Beckett's plays, in which people try to avoid the grim realities of their lives by burying themselves in theater-of-the-absurd banalities. In turn, Mr. Pinter's influence can be seen in the strained dialogue of David Mamet's characters and the jousting for power frequent to novels and plays of the second half of the 20th century. Many considered him to be the greatest playwright since Beckett, and last October he won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Mr. Pinter was born in 1930 in Hackney, a working class section near the East End of London. His father was a ladies' tailor. Grandparents on both sides of the family fled Eastern Europe at the turn of the 20th century to escape pogroms against Jews. He was an only child, given to reading, and as he matured he gravitated to Dostoevsky and Kafka. From his teen-age years as a conscientious objector, Pinter was a committed leftist. He was a scathing critic of the war in Iraq, going so far as to call British prime minister Tony Blair ''a deluded idiot'' and ''a mass murderer.''