Cady, winner of the Nebula, Phillip K. Dick, World Fantasy and Bram Stoker awards for science fiction, died Wednesday at Jefferson General Hospital of complications of bladder cancer, said Carol Orlock, his wife of 27 years and a writer.

His novels include "The Hauntings of Hood Canal " in 2001, "The Off Season" in 1996 and "Street: A Novel" in 1995, all published by St. Martin's Press, and "Inagehi," published in 1993 by Broken Moon Press.

Born in Columbus, Ohio, Cady worked as a truck driver intermittently until his late 30s and for a time ran his own landscape construction business.

He spent four years with the Coast Guard in Maine, then earned a bachelor's degree at the University of Louisville in 1961. Four years later he received the Atlantic Monthly's Atlantic First Award for the short story "The Burning."

In the Web transcript of an interview for Event Horizon's Flashpoint in 1999, Cady said he was a truck driver and auctioneer in Louisville at the time, pounding a Royal manual typewriter while seated in his truck.

"Looking back on it, I think it (the award) was a fluke," he said. "I still had to learn how to write."

Greater recognition arrived with the Iowa Prize for Short Fiction in 1972 for "The Burning and Other Stories."

From 1968 to 1973 he was an assistant professor at the University of Washington in Seattle, and from the late 1970s to the mid-80s, he wrote as a free-lancer, including a column in the Peninsula Daily News in Port Angeles.

In 1986 he won a Pacific Northwest Excellence in Journalism Award for education reporting.

In 1992 he received a $20,000 creating writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

He retired from college teaching in 1999 after 13 years at Pacific Lutheran University outside Tacoma. "The American Writer," his survey of American literary thought from 1620 to the 1970s, was published that same year by St. Martin's.

Cady's horror, fantasy and ghost stories often featured vivid depictions of real-life settings from areas around his adopted home at the northeast tip of the Olympic Peninsula.

"The Off Season," for example, was described in Library Journal as "an offbeat, whimsical tale (that) recounts the history of Point Vestal, a Pacific Northwest coastal town where ghosts walk the streets in broad daylight."

"Jack always thought of ghosts as representing forces in history the evil and goodness in the world collected," Orlock said. "He embodied those ghostly forces in his stories."

Other survivors include four children from a previous marriage and two sisters. Orlock said Cady will be cremated in a private ceremony, followed by a celebration of his life and art in Port Townsend in March.

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