John Riley, USA TODAY 9:30 a.m. EDT August 30, 2015

Oliver Sacks speaks at the World Science Festival in New York in 2008.(Photo: Getty Images file)

Oliver Sacks, the neurologist and popular author of Awakenings, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and other books, died Sunday of cancer, according to mulitple media reports.

Sacks, 82, wrote in a Times essay in February that he was in the late stages of a melanoma that had spread to his liver. He died at his home in New York City, longtime personal assistant Kate Edgar told the The New York Times. A friend and colleague, New York University professor Orrin Devinsky, confirmed the death in an email to NPR.

Many of Sacks' books used case histories of his patients as the basis for essays about the brain, the mind and the human condition. His book Awakenings, about a group of encepahlitis patients who briefly regained their mental faculties only to lose them again, inspired the 1990 Oscar-nominated film of the same name starring Robin Williams and Robert DeNiro.

In The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Sacks wrote about his patients struggling to live with conditions such as autism, Tourette's Syndrome, and Parkinson's Disease. Other books explored deafness, colorblindness, migraines, hallucinations, and other phenomena.

In his February Times essay, Sacks wrote: "Over the last few days, I have been able to see my life as from a great altitude, as a sort of landscape, and with a deepening sense of the connection of all its parts. This does not mean I am finished with life. On the contrary, I feel intensely alive, and I want and hope in the time that remains to deepen my friendships, to say farewell to those I love, to write more, to travel if I have the strength, to achieve new levels of understanding and insight."

The London-born Sacks also served as a professor of neurology at the NYU School of Medicine, Columbia University Medical Center, according to his website.

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