Judi Ann Mason, whose precocious success as a playwright brought her to network television as one of the first female African-American sitcom writers and one of the youngest television writers of any race or either sex, died July 8 in Los Angeles. She was 54.

The cause was a ruptured aorta, the Writers Guild of America, West, said in a news release.

Mason was just 19 and a student at Grambling State College in Louisiana when she wrote “Livin’ Fat,” a comedy about a struggling black family in a Southern city whose members find their lives changed and values challenged when one of them accidentally discovers a cache of stolen money from a bank robbery.

Popular success

The play was produced off Broadway in 1976 by the Negro Ensemble Company, but even before that, it won a comedy award sponsored by the Kennedy Center and the television producer Norman Lear. Lear then hired her as a writer for the series “Good Times,” a broad comedy spinoff of “Maude” about the family of Maude’s former housekeeper, Florida Evans. It starred Esther Rolle, John Amos and Jimmie Walker.

Mason went on to write for a number of popular television series, including “Sanford,” a vehicle for Redd Foxx that was a sequel to “Sanford and Son”; “A Different World,” the “Cosby Show” spinoff set at a black college; the popular prime-time soap “Beverly Hills 90210”; and “I’ll Fly Away,” a dramatic series set in the 1950s South that focused on a successful white lawyer (Sam Waterston) and the black woman (Regina Taylor) who cares for his children.

For the movies, Mason was a writer of “Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit,” starring Whoopi Goldberg.

For the stage

She was also a playwright whose works received several off-Broadway productions, including “The Daughters of the Mock,” and “Jonah and the Wonder Dog.” Her 1977 play, “A Star Ain’t Nothin’ But a Hole in Heaven,” about a small-town Southern girl and the life she will leave behind if she takes a college scholarship, focused on the conflict between the opportunities afforded young blacks by the civil rights movement and the cuxltural values that were consequently diminished. It was the first winner of the Kennedy Center’s Lorraine Hansberry Award for plays about the African-American experience. “Miss Mason fills her play with laughter, but her exploration of loss and gain is as serious as it is in any of the works about the ’60s being written by a growing number of black playwrights,” D.J.R. Bruckner wrote in The New York Times about a 1987 production of the play. He added: “Miss Mason has created captivating characters and given them wonderful lines to express familiar emotions.”