August Wilson

August Wilson (born April 27, 1945, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, U.S.—died October 2, 2005, Seattle, Washington) was a playwright who penned an acclaimed cycle of plays, each set in a different decade of the 20th century, about Black American life. He won Pulitzer Prizes for two of them: Fences and The Piano Lesson.

Wilson grew up in the Hill District of Pittsburgh, a lively poor neighbourhood that became the setting for most of his plays. Together with five siblings, he was raised by his mother, Daisy Wilson, after his father, Frederick August Kittel, left her and their children. Daisy Wilson later remarried, and in 1958 the family moved to a suburb of Pittsburgh.

The complexity of Wilson’s experience of race while growing up would be expressed in his plays. His mother was Black, his father white, and his stepfather, David Bedford, Black. The Hill District was mostly Black, and the suburb, Hazelwood, was predominately white. Wilson and his family were the target of racial threats in Hazelwood, and he quit school at age 15 after being accused of having plagiarized a paper. He turned to self-education, reading intensively in a public library and returning to the Hill District to learn from residents there. He changed his last name from Kittel to Wilson, and in the late 1960s he embraced the Black Arts movement. In 1968 he became the cofounder and director of Black Horizons Theatre in Pittsburgh. He also published poetry in such journals as Black World (1971) and Black Lines (1972).

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In 1978 Wilson moved to St. Paul, Minnesota, and in the early 1980s he wrote several plays, including Jitney, which was first produced in 1982. Focused on cab drivers in the 1970s, it underwent subsequent revisions as part of his historical cycle; it was published in 2000. His first major play, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, opened on Broadway in 1984 and was a critical and financial success. Set in Chicago in 1927, the play centres on a verbally abusive blues singer, her fellow Black musicians, and their white manager; it was later made into a movie (2020). Fences, first produced in 1985 and published in 1986, is about a conflict between a father and his son in the 1950s; it received a Tony Award for best play, and a film adaptation was released in 2016.

Wilson’s chronicle of the Black American experience continued with Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, first produced in 1986, a play about the lives of residents of a boardinghouse in 1911, and The Piano Lesson, first produced in 1987, which is set in the 1930s and explores a family’s ambivalence about selling an heirloom; it was adapted for television in 1995. The action of Two Trains Running, first produced in 1990, takes place in a coffeehouse in the 1960s. Seven Guitars, first produced in 1995 as the seventh play of the cycle, is set among a group of friends who reunite in 1948 following the death of a local blues guitarist.

Subsequent plays in the series are King Hedley II, first produced in 1999, an account of an ex-con’s efforts to rebuild his life in the 1980s, and Gem of the Ocean, first produced in 2003, which takes place in 1904 and centres on Aunt Ester, a 287-year-old spiritual healer mentioned in previous plays, and a man who seeks her help. Wilson completed the cycle with Radio Golf, first produced in 2005. Set in the 1990s, the play concerns the fate of Aunt Ester’s house, which is slated to be torn down by real-estate developers. Music, particularly jazz and blues, is a recurrent theme in Wilson’s works, and its cadence is echoed in the lyrical, vernacular nature of his dialogue.

Wilson received numerous honours during his career, including seven New York Drama Critics’ Circle Awards for best play. He also held Guggenheim and Rockefeller fellowships. Shortly after his death, the Virginia Theater on Broadway was renamed in his honour. The August Wilson Center for African American Culture opened in Pittsburgh in 2009.

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