Peter Nichols, the British dramatist whose first and most frequently revived play, “A Day in the Death of Joe Egg,” startled and moved London and Broadway audiences of the 1960s by telling the story of a brain-damaged child’s brief life in a darkly comic style that would become his signature, died on Saturday in Oxford, England. He was 92.

His death was announced on Twitter by the agency Alan Brodie Representation.

“Joe Egg” was largely autobiographical — an attempt to “cicatrize the scar,” he said — because a difficult birth had left his first daughter, Abigail, so profoundly disabled that he felt “she hardly existed as a person at all.”

Much of his subsequent work also derived from personal experience, notably his 1971 play “Forget-Me-Not Lane,” in which a thinly disguised Mr. Nichols recalls key moments in his youth, including the time his cheerfully eccentric but somewhat puritanical father embarrassed him by walking down a theater aisle and ordering a smutty comedian to quit the stage. The audience hissed at and booed his father and shouted, “Throw him out!”