August Wilson

• Born: 27 April 1945
• Birthplace: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
• Died: 2 October 2005 (Liver cancer)
• Best Known As: Pulitzer-winning author of Fences and The Piano Lesson

Name at birth: Frederick August Kittel

August Wilson was an influential 20th-century playwright and the most prominent African American of that craft. Though he lived much of his adult life in St. Paul, Minnesota, and in Seattle, the characters and plots of his plays were inspired by realities he experienced growing up in Pittsburgh's Hill District and Oakland neighborhood: poverty, racism, and the richness of Black culture. He was noted especially for his "Decade Cycle" or "Pittsburgh Cycle," consisting of one play set in each decade of the 20th century. He won Pulitzer Prizes for The Piano Lesson (set in the 1930's; premiered on Broadway 1990) and Fences (1950's; premiered 1987, a Tony winner). The "Cycle" plays won seven New York Drama Critics Circle awards, an American Theatre Critics award, and a British Olivier Award.

He was called Freddy as a child after his German American father, Frederick Kittel, who was absent for much of Wilson's childhood. At age 20 he chose to be called August and took the last name of his African American mother, Daisy Wilson... He had three marriages -- to Brenda Burton (1969-1972), Judy Oliver (1981-1990) and Constanza Romero (1994 until his death) -- and two daughters: Sakina Ansari (born 1970) and Azula Carmen (1997).

Wilson, August (b. 1945), playwright, poet, essayist, and two-time recipient of the Pulitzer Prize. The winner of Bush, McKnight, Rockefeller, and Guggenheim Foundation fellowships in playwriting, August Wilson also had the distinction in 1988 of having two plays running simultaneously on Broadway: Joe Turner's Come and Gone and Fences. Clearly, he is one of America's most prominent playwrights, yet his origins offered few indications that he would achieve such dramatic accomplishment.

He was born as Frederick Kittel on “The Hill,” a racially mixed area of Pittsburgh, Pensylvania, to Frederick Kittel, a German baker, and Daisy Wilson Kittel, a cleaning woman whose mother walked from North Carolina to Pittsburgh seeking greater opportunity. The fourth of six children, Wilson grew up in a two-room apartment behind a grocery store. His white father was a distant figure whom Wilson seldom saw.

Following his parent's divorce and his mother's subsequent remarriage to David Bedford, Wilson and his family relocated to a white suburb where he encountered increased racism. In 1961—after being falsely accused of plagiarizing a paper he had written about Napoléon—Wilson dropped out of Gladstone High School. Unable to find satisfactory employment, he joined the army in 1963 and one year later was able to wrangle an early discharge.

On 1 April 1965, Wilson bought his first typewriter, having determined that he would become a writer. In the fall of that year, he moved into a rooming house and began a long and varied assortment of menial jobs to support his writing. That same year he helped form the Center Avenue Poets Theatre Workshop and heard Bessie Smith's records for the first time. The latter had a profound effect upon his determination to capture black cultural and historical experience in his writing. It would also lead directly to one of Wilson's first publications: the poem “Bessie” eventually appeared in Black Lines in the summer of 1971.

Throughout the rest of the 1960s, Wilson continued to hone his writing skills and to be active in the community of African American writers, helping Rob Penny found the Black Horizons Theatre Company on the Hill. During this period Wilson was active in the Black Power movement and was also beginning to publish his poetry: his first publication was “For Malcolm X and Others,” which appeared in Negro Digest in September 1969. He married Brenda Burton, a Muslim, in 1969 as well. Their daughter, Sakina Ansari, was born in 1970.

After the dissolution of this marriage in 1972, Wilson intensified his efforts as a writer. In 1973, he wrote “Morning Statement,” a poem that he—borrowing a term from Robert Duncan—often cites as evidence of his achieving “surety” of his craft, and his poem “Theme One: The Variations” was included in the anthology The Poetry of Black America. He had also begun writing plays, completing Rite of Passage during this period. In 1973, his unpublished play Recycle was produced by a community theater in Pittsburgh. In 1976, he saw a production of Athol Fugard's Sizwe Bansi Is Dead, which greatly encouraged him about his own ability to write drama, and he wrote The Home-coming, which would not be produced until 1989 but whose subject matter foreshadows his first Broadway success, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom. A fictitious treatment of episodes in the life of blues singer and guitarist Blind Lemon Jefferson, who froze to death in Chicago in 1930, Homecoming illustrates Wilson's growing concern for incorporating traditional black art forms and the lives of African American cultural icons into his work. In 1977, he wrote Black Bart and the Sacred Hills, a musical satire based on a group of poems about an outlaw of the Old West. Most critics consider this to be Wilson's serious theatrical debut; the play was produced in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1981.

In 1978, Wilson moved to St. Paul to write plays for Claude Purdy and to work as a scriptwriter for the Science Museum of Minnesota. The following year he completed Jitney, a two-act play about jitney drivers in Pittsburgh, which would serve as his first rejection from the Eugene O'Neill Theatre Center National Playwrights Conference but which would be accepted by the Minneapolis Playwright's Center in 1980 and produced at the Allegheny Repertory Theatre in Pittsburgh in 1982. In 1980, Wilson received a Jerome fellowship, became associate playwright with Playwrights' Center in Minneapolis, and wrote Fullerton Street—his play of the 1940s that looks at urban blacks who have migrated to the North and that remains unpublished and unproduced; this play was also rejected by the O'Neill Center.

In 1981, Wilson married Judy Oliver, a white social worker. The following year he wrote Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, which was accepted for workshop production at the O'Neill, and Wilson began the first of many collaborative efforts with Lloyd Richards, the director of the O'Neill and the dean of the Yale Drama School. When this play opened on Broadway at the Cort Theatre in 1984, it brought Wilson critical acclaim and launched his theatrical career. Set in 1920s Chicago, the play looks at the economic exploitation of black musicians by white record companies and at the ways in which victims of racism are forced to direct their rage at each other rather than at their oppressors. Although Clive Barnes criticized the play for its overemphasis on politics and its predictable ending, Frank Rich saw the play as a searing account of white racism's effect upon its victims and gave the play laudatory reviews. The play certainly treats the dangers of misplaced hatred. Because Levee cannot accept the salvation of his heritage, he slays the messenger who reminds him that such possibilities exist: Levee kills Toledo as a substitute for the white men who have raped his mother and those who are now rejecting his music. The play won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award (1985) and was nominated for a Tony.

Wilson joined New Dramatists in New York in 1983, and Fences was produced at the O'Neill. Unfortunately, Wilson's mother died in March before she could witness his Broadway success. Writing at least partly to show his critics that he could follow the traditional European American drama format of focusing on one major character, he gave the play a strong unity. It looks at the struggles of a 1950s working-class family to find economic security. A garbageman, ex-con, and former Negro Baseball League player, Troy Maxson is perhaps Wilson's best-known protagonist, a man who is unable to believe that his son will be allowed to benefit from the football scholarship he is being offered. White critics were quick to point out parallels between Troy and Willy Loman. Fences was produced at the Yale Repertory Theatre in 1986, and following its opening at the 46th Street Theatre in New York in 1987, it won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award, the Drama Desk Award, the Tony, and the Pulitzer; the Chicago Tribune selected Wilson as Artist of the Year; and he received the John Gassner Outer Critics' Circle Award for Best American Playwright.

While Fences was still enjoying a successful run on Broadway in 1988, Joe Turner's Come and Gone opened at the Ethel Barrymore. Written in 1984 and workshopped at the O'Neill that same year, the play had been produced at Yale in 1986. Inspired by the Romare Bearden collage “Millhand's Lunch Bucket,” it is Wilson's admitted favorite. It focuses on the personal and cultural aftermath of both slavery and the black northern migration as they are manifested in a Pittsburgh boarding house in 1911. Many critics consider this to be the most Afrocentric of Wilson's plays and his most successful literary effort. It was nominated for a Tony and won the New York Drama Critics' Award. This same year the New York Public Library added Wilson to its list of Literary Lions.

Wilson's fourth play to be produced on Broadway and his second to win a Pulitzer, The Piano Lesson, was also inspired by a Bearden collage. It won the Drama Desk, New York Drama Critics' Circle, and the American Theatre Critics Outstanding Play awards. Written in 1986, it was presented at the O'Neill and the Yale Repertory in 1987 and opened after a long tour of regional theaters at the Walter Kerr in 1990. Focusing on the question of who has the right to own a family's heirloom piano, the play is set in 1936 and captures the conflict that arises between African American and mainstream cultural values. During this period, Wilson moved to Seattle.

Wilson was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1991. His play Two Trains Running, written in 1989, was produced by the Yale Repertory in 1990, and opened at the Walter Kerr on Broadway in 1992. It was nominated for a Tony and won the American Theatre Critics' Association Award. Returning to the Hill as a setting, Wilson places the action in a coffee shop where regulars converge to discuss their plight in 1960s America. The play stresses the necessity of coming to terms with the past before attempting to move forward. His latest play in the twentieth century cycle is Seven Guitars, which was produced in 1996.

At the outset of his career, Wilson envisioned theater as a means to raise the collective community's consciousness about black life in twentieth-century America and committed himself to writing a cycle of ten plays that would rewrite the history of each decade of this century so that black life becomes a more fully acknowledged part of America's theatrical history. His plays are not, however, agitprop. He avoids pat answers; instead, he effects a powerful experience that forces his audience to search for their own political conclusions as an extension of his characters' life situations. A playwright of startling imagination and depth, he is often considered a theatrical spokesperson for the African American experience, and his ability to infuse everyday language with the stuff of poetry is an essential, distinguishing factor of his work. Perhaps he no longer considers himself a poet, but it is his poetic gift that has helped him to become the preeminent playwright in contemporary American drama.

Bibliography

• Chip Brown,“The Light in August,” Esquire, Apr. 1989, 116–125.
• Sandra Shannon, “The Good Christian's Come and Gone: The Shifting Role of Religion in August Wilson's Plays,” MELUS: The Journal of the Society for the Study of Multi-ethnic Literature of the United States 16 (Fall 1989–1990): 127–142.
• Paul Carter Harrison, “August Wilson's Blues Poetics,” in August Wilson: Three Plays, 1991, pp. 291–318.
• Yvonne Shafer, “August Wilson: A New Approach to Black Drama,” ZAA: Zeitschrift fur Anglistik und Amerikanistik, vol. 39, 1991, pp. 17–27.
• Mark Rocha, “A Conversation with August Wilson,” Diversity: A Journal of Multicultural Issues 1 (Fall 1992): 24–42. Alan Nadel, ed., May All Your Fences Have Gates: Essays on the Drama of August Wilson, 1993. Marilyn Elkins, ed., August Wilson: A Casebook, 1994.
• Yvonne Shafer, “August Wilson and the Contemporary Theatre,” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 12:1 (Fall 1997): 23–38.
• Sandra G. Shannon, “A Transplant That Did Not Take: August Wilson's Views on the Great Migration,” African American Review 31:4 (Winter 1997): 659–666. Shafer, August Wilson: A Research and Production Sourcebook (1998).
• Bonnie Lyons, “An Interview with August Wilson,” Contemporary Literature 40:1 (Spring 1999): 1–21.
• Mary L. Boqumil, August Wilson, 1999

Marilyn Elkins

For more information on August Wilson, visit Britannica.com.

Wilson, August (b. 1945), playwright. He was born in a working‐class neighborhood in Pittsburgh and was a high‐school dropout. In his twenties he started to write poetry, only later turning to drama. Wilson's earliest plays were mounted at regional theatres, then the Eugene O'Neill Memorial Theater Center and the Yale Repertory Theatre took an interest in his works and he received widespread recognition. His subsequent plays attempted to illustrate aspects of African‐American life in different decades of the 20th century, most of them set in Pittsburgh. His first success in New York was Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (1984), followed by Fences (1987), Joe Turner's Come and Gone (1988), The Piano Lesson (1990), Seven Guitars (1996), Two Trains Running (1992), Jitney (2000), King Hedley II (2001), and Gem of the Ocean (2003). Wilson's plays are mostly character studies with little plot but explosive situations and dialogue, creating a musical tone that is uniquely African American. He is the most prodigious, awarded, and successful playwright of his race in the history of the American theatre.

Two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning American playwright August Wilson (Frederick August Kittell; 1945-2005) embarked upon a mission to write a cycle of ten plays addressing central issues that have impacted African Americans in each decade of the 20th century. The first five evolve from the playwright's own commentary upon illconceived, ill-advised, yet sometimes unavoidable choices made by past generations of African Americans and their too frequent negative consequences.

Christened Frederick August Kittell was born in 1945 and later changed his name to August Wilson. He was the namesake of an irresponsible German baker. His father spent little time with his family in their two-room apartment in Pittsburgh's Hill District where Wilson, his mother, and five brothers and sisters survived on public assistance and earnings from her janitorial job. Wilson's move to adopt the maiden name of his African American mother, Daisy Wilson, in the 1970s was not just a means of disavowing his estranged white father. His decision to call himself August Wilson also represented a significant rite of passage marking both his discovery and celebration of ties with Africa. His identification with his mother's roots later became the driving force behind young Wilson's fascination with the language and culture of African Americans.

Against the pleas of his mother, Wilson gave up on formal education in the ninth grade. Memories of former years spent in the Pittsburgh public school system included a devastating accusation by one of his teachers that he was not the original author of a term paper that he had, in fact, written on Napoleon Bonaparte. Offended by the affront to his integrity and bored with the stifling regimentation of Pittsburgh's schools, Wilson turned to the city's tobacco shops, barber shops, and street corners for schooling of a different sort. While mingling among fellow African American residents of the working-class neighborhood where he grew up listening to their uncensored language, Wilson developed an intimate knowledge of their lifestyles. His time spent in this environment would later serve him well in creating credible characters for his cycle of plays depicting the African American experience.

But Pittsburgh's streets and shops did not satisfy Wilson's appetite for knowledge about African Americans. He was drawn to the city's public libraries where he poured over the works of Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, and other African American writers. A reader since the age of four, Wilson had no trouble comprehending these works that gave direction to the quest for his own racial consciousness.

From Poet to Playwright

After finally moving out of his mother's house in 1965, Wilson found lodging at a nearby rooming house, took a job as a short-order cook, and tried his hand at verse. Armed with a $20 typewriter he purchased with money from his sister Freda, Wilson tried desperately to become a successful poet and writer. This newfound freedom allowed Wilson to mingle with the Bohemian set. He learned their language and their ideals, emerging as a self-proclaimed Dylan Thomas. During this time he also identified with the cultural nationalists such as Amiri Baraka, (then known as LeRoi Jones), who argued for heightened racial consciousness. His initiation into African American aestheticism culminated in a heightened awareness of the importance of the blues, Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, and writers of the Harlem Renaissance.

In the late 1960s an interest in Malcolm X led him to a total acknowledgement of African American culture as his own. Renouncing his white father, moving out from his mother's house, and living among day to day reminders of this culture cleared the way for Wilson to find out more about his African American ancestors' trek from the fields of North Carolina to the cramped urban shelters of Pittsburgh. What followed this phase of cultural enlightenment in Wilson's life were organized efforts to raise consciousness among Pittsburgh natives. With such an agenda, Wilson co-founded, with director Rob Penny, Pittsburgh's Black Horizons Theater in 1968.

Although Wilson chose to imitate the style of flamboyant British poet Dylan Thomas during an early stage in his evolution into an artist, he soon realized that his African American heritage, grounded in the blues tradition, was at odds with the alien persona he had chosen to idolize. Serendipity was largely responsible for his discovery of the tremendous role music, in particular the blues, played in his writing. After buying a three-dollar record player that only played 78s, he discovered a record store that proved to be a veritable gold mine of the records that were no longer in circulation. Here he found a copy of Bessie Smith's "Nobody in Town Can Bake a Sweet Jelly Roll Like Mine" and was so moved by its Iyrics that he played it repeatedly. He later recalled, "I'd never heard of Bessie Smith. I listened to it twenty-two times, and I became aware that this stuff was my own. Patti Page, Frank Sinatra - they weren't me. This was me. The music became the wellspring of my work. I took the stuff and ran with it."

It took numerous rejection slips from magazines and several uninspired poetry readings to finally dissuade the would-be poet and nudge him in the direction of the theater. His conversion from poet to playwright was coerced by a supportive friend, Claude Purdy. In 1977 Wilson's poetry reading in Pittsburgh about a character named Black Bart so impressed Purdy that he encouraged Wilson to turn the material into a play. After much complaining that he could not write a play, Wilson sat down to complete the work in one week (Black Bart and the Sacred Hills [1981]).

In 1982 Lloyd Richards - artistic director of the Eugene O'Neill Theater in Waterford, Connecticut, dean of Yale's School of Drama, and director of the Yale Repertory Theater - discovered that among the hundreds of scripts sent to him was Wilson's Ma Rainey's Black Bottom. Although Richards admitted that the play had structural problems, he realized that, aside from these weaknesses, it evidenced an incredibly gifted talent. Over the next eight years Wilson and Richards formed a close alliance. Some have described their unique relationship with words like "avuncular," "paternal," or simply "compatible." At any rate, the two men blended their playwriting and directing talents to produce a string of successful plays. Wilson wrote the plays while Richards directed and polished them in workshop environments such as the Yale Repertory Theater and various regional theaters throughout the United States. Beginning with the initial Broadway success of Ma Rainey's Black Bottom in 1984, the two men collaborated successfully on four more of Wilson's plays: Fences, Joe Turner's Come and Gone, The Piano Lesson, and Two Trains Running. During his collaboration with Richards, all of Wilson's works took similar routes, preliminary staging at the O'Neill Theater Center followed by presentations at the Yale Repertory Theater and other resident non-profit theaters and an eventual Broadway production.

Chronicles of African American History

Gaining confidence as a playwright from close associations with important contacts such as directors Purdy and Richards, Wilson committed himself to writing a series of plays addressing central issues that have impacted African Americans in each decade of the 20th century. Although he initially did not set out to write a history of his people, he rather accidentally realized a pattern of sorts developing in his early works; he had written plays that addressed issues peculiar to 1911, 1927, 1941, 1957, and 1971. The idea of writing one play per decade pleased Wilson, for once he discerned a pattern, he then was able to focus his playwriting skills on what he felt were the most important issues confronting African Americans each decade and then committed himself to writing ten plays emphasizing these issues.

Wilson's first Broadway success, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (1984), was based upon an imagined day in the life of Gertrude Pridgett "Ma" Rainey, often called the "Mother of the Blues." The play focuses upon rampant greed, insensitivity, and racism in the 1920s recording business. The victims of the time period are typified by Ma Rainey and her band of talented yet frustrated musicians. His second play to reach Broadway, Fences (1985), earned him his first Pulitzer Prize. It portrays the frustration of a former African American League baseball player in the industrial North of the 1950s. In Joe Turner's Come and Gone (1986), Wilson concentrated upon the cultural fragmentation as well as the emotional and physical effects of the accompanying displacement of newly freed African Americans following the Civil War.

The Piano Lesson (1987) earned Wilson a second Pulitzer Prize in the spring of 1990. Central to this play's conflict is an old piano, which simultaneously functions as an emblem of both African folk tradition and American capitalism. The pictorial history carved into its surface by the great-grandfather of the currently embattled siblings, Berneice and Boy Willie, appreciates both its monetary and sentimental values. Berneice wants to preserve it as a family heirloom, while Boy Willie wants to sell it to afford a piece of land. Wilson's chronicle of the 1960s, Two Trains Running, debuted at the Yale Repertory Theater in March 1990 and was making its way through various regional theaters on its way to an almost certain Broadway finale. Set in 1968 in a small restaurant in an African American section of Pittsburgh (apparently its Hill District), Wilson's play tells the story of neighbors sorting out problems, complaining about injustices, loving, fighting, and communing.

Wilson's Seven Guitars hit Broadway in 1995, reuniting him with longtime collaborator Richards. The story, set in Pittsburgh in the 1940s, tells the story of Floyd "Schoolboy" Barton, who died before his career as a blues guitarist could take off. The San Diego Sun reviewed the show as containing "rich, casually revealing language." The Broadway version featured Keith David, famous for his role in Jelly's Last Jam.

"All the ideas and attitudes of my characters come straight out of the blues," Wilson said, during an interview with People magazine. "I look behind the lyrics." Seven Guitars is no exception.

Along with his two Pulitzers, Wilson received the Black Filmakers Hall of Fame Award in 1991. In 1992 he earned the Antoinette Perry Award nomination for best play, as well as the American Theatre Critics' Association Award, for Two Trains Running. He also received the Clarence Muse Award in 1992.

Wilson moved to Seattle in 1990 with his third wife, Constanza Romero, a costume designer who worked on The Piano Lesson with him. Wilson's only daughter, Sakina Ansari, found her career as a social worker in Baltimore.

Further Reading

Because August Wilson is relatively new to the literary world, a critical study of his work remains to be done. However, several excellent sources are available in the form of interviews, feature articles, and theater reviews. For detailed biographical information consult Chip Brown's "The Light in August" in Esquire (April 1989). For information of his plays and his aesthetics, see Bill Moyers' A World of Ideas: Conversations with Thoughtful Men and Women about American Life Today and the Ideas Shaping Our Future (1989) and David Savran's In Their Own Words: Contemporary American Playwrights (1988). Magazine feature articles include Nick Charles' "August Wilson: Stages of Black America," in Emerge (April 1990); Hillary DeVries' "A Song in Search of Itself: August Wilson Is a Chronicler of Black America's Recent Past," in American Theater (January 1987); and Ishmael Reed's "A Shy Genius Transforms American Theater," in Connoisseur 217 (March 1987).

playwright; poet

Personal Information

Born Frederick August Kittel on April 27, 1945, in Pittsburgh, PA; died on October 2, 2005, in Seattle, WA; son of Frederick August Kittel (a baker) and Daisy Wilson (a housekeeper); married Brenda Burton, 1969 (divorced, 1972); married Judy Oliver (a social worker), 1981 (divorced); married Constanza Romero (costume designer), 1988; children: Sakina Ansari (with Burton); Azula (with Romero).

Career

Playwright. Worked as a sheet-metal worker, porter, toy-store stock worker, gardener, dishwasher, and short-order cook; poet, 1970s; Black Horizons on the Hill (theater company), Pittsburgh, PA, co-founder, 1968.

Life's Work

August Wilson carved his signature on American theater by capturing the changing texture of black life in America his ten plays, each covering a different decade of the twentieth century. About his achievement, he remarked in American Theatre: "From the beginning, I decided not to write about historical events or the pathologies of the black community. The details of our struggle to survive and prosper, in what has been a difficult and sometimes bitter relationship with a system of laws and practices that deny us access to the tools necessary for productive and industrious life, are available to any serious student of history or sociology. Instead, I wanted to present the unique particulars of black American culture as the transformation of impulse and sensibility into codes of conduct and response, into cultural rituals that defined and celebrated ourselves as men and women of high purpose." He did. And the skill with which he did won him two Pulitzer Prizes, a Tony Award, and seven New York Drama Critics Circle Awards, in addition to twenty-three honorary degrees.

When Wilson began writing his plays, he had little experience with theater, having only seen two plays, and no formal training. Unencumbered by theatrical history, Wilson created his own rules for his plays. Wilson had no particular method of writing his plays, but admitted to relying on what he called the "4 B's": the Blues; fellow playwright, Amiri Baraka; author, Jorge Luis Borges, and painter, Romare Bearden, to tell what he needs to tell. Regarding Bearden, Wilson claimed, "When I saw his work, it was the first time that I had seen black life presented in all its richness, and I said, 'I want to do that--I want my plays to be the equal of his canvases.'" His ingenuity has forever changed American theater.

Plays Explored African-American Identity

Called "one of the most important voices in the American theater today" in the 1980s by Mervyn Rothstein in the New York Times, August Wilson's legacy will be as a giant of American theater. As James Earl Jones wrote in Time, Wilson "didn't just write a great play, he has written volumes of good, better and best plays." He wrote a string of acclaimed plays since his Ma Rainey's Black Bottom first excited the theater world in 1984. His authentic sounding characters have brought a new understanding of the black experience to audiences in a series of plays, each one addressing people of color in each decade of the twentieth century. Although Wilson's "decade" plays were not written in chronological order, the consistent, and key, theme in Wilson's dramas is the sense of disconnection suffered by blacks uprooted from their original homeland. He told the Chicago Tribune that "by not developing their own tradition, a more African response to the world, [African Americans] lost their sense of identity." Wilson devoted himself to helping black people know their roots in order to help them understand themselves, and his plays demonstrate the black struggle to gain this understanding--or escape from it. Charles Whittaker, a critic for Ebony in 2001 wrote, "Each of the eight plays he has produced to date is set in a different decade of the 20th century, a device that has enabled Wilson to explore, often in very subtle ways, the myriad and mutating forms of the legacy of slavery."

Most of the ideas for Wilson's plays came from images, snippets of conversation, or lyrics from blues songs captured by his ever-vigilant writer's eye and ear. Virtually all of his characters end up singing the blues to show their feelings at key moments during his plays. The play Fences evolved from his seeing an image of a man holding a baby, and Joe Turner's Come and Gone from the depiction of a struggling mill hand in a collage by acclaimed black painter Romare Bearden, whom Wilson has cited as a particularly strong influence on his work. The blues always had the greatest influence on Wilson, however. "I have always consciously been chasing the musicians," Wilson told interviewer Sandra G. Shannon in African American Review. "It's like our culture is in the music. And the writers are way behind the musicians I see. So I'm trying to close the gap."

August Wilson grew up as the fourth of six children in a black slum of Pittsburgh, his home a two-room apartment without hot water or a telephone. Relying on welfare checks and wages from house cleaning jobs, his mother, Daisy Wilson, managed to keep her children clothed and fed. August's father, Frederick August Kittel, a baker by trade, was a white German immigrant who never lived with the family and rarely made an appearance at the apartment. August Wilson officially erased his connection to his real father when he adopted his mother's name in the 1970s. David Bedford became Wilson's stepfather when the boy was a teenager, but their relationship was rocky. An ex-convict whose race prevented him from earning a football scholarship to college, Bedford would become a source for the play Fences, whose protagonist is a former baseball player blocked from the major leagues by segregation.

Learning to read at the age of four, Wilson consumed books voraciously. At first he read the Nancy Drew mysteries his mother managed to buy for the family, but by age 12 he was a regular at the local library. Despite his interest in the written word, August Wilson was an unexceptional student who developed a reputation for yelling answers out of turn in class. The mostly white parochial high school he attended also gave him a harsh dose of racism. When he turned in a well-written term paper on Napoleon, Wilson was accused of plagiarism by a teacher who would not believe a black child could do that well on his own. Wilson would often find notes on his desk reading "Nigger go home." At home, his family had to endure racial taunts when they moved to the mostly white Hazelwood area of Pittsburgh.

Pursued Writing from a Young Age

At age 15, sick of the racism that surrounded him, Wilson dropped out of school and began to educate himself, beginning in the "Negro" section of the public library. Reading works by Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, Arna Bontemps, and other black writers, Wilson was caught up in the power of words. His fascination with language made him an avid listener, and he soaked up the conversations he overheard in coffee shops and on street corners, using the tidbits of conversations to construct stories in his head.

By his late teens, Wilson had dedicated himself to the task of becoming a writer. His mother wanted him to become a lawyer, but when her son continued to work at odd jobs, she got fed up with what she considered his lack of direction and kicked him out of the house. He enlisted in the U.S. Army, but somehow got himself discharged a year later. At age 20 he moved into a boarding house and began writing lines of poetry on paper bags while sitting in a local restaurant, gathering inspiration from tales swapped by elderly men at a nearby cigar store.

The symbolic starting point of Wilson's serious writing career came in 1965 when he bought a used typewriter, paying for it with 20 dollars that his sister gave him for writing her a rush term paper on Robert Frost and Carl Sandburg. Wilson immersed himself in the works of Dylan Thomas and John Berryman. He also loved Amiri Baraka's poems and plays because of their lively rhythms and street-smart language. Although some of Wilson's poems were published in some small magazines over the next few years, he failed to achieve recognition as a poet.

In the late 1960s, Wilson discovered the writings of Malcolm X and, according to Chip Brown in Esquire, took up the banner of cultural nationalism. "Cultural nationalism meant black people working toward self-definition, self-determination," Wilson told Brown. "It meant that we had a culture that was valid and that we weren't willing to trade it to participate in the American Dream." In 1969 Wilson and Rob Penny, a playwright and teacher, founded the black activist theater company Black Horizons on the Hill, which focused on politicizing the community and raising black consciousness. Black Horizons gave Wilson the chance to present his own early plays, mostly in public schools and community centers. Wilson never fully embraced the religion of Black Nationalism, however, which contributed to the failure of his first marriage to Brenda Burton, a member of the Muslim Nation of Islam.

Found His Voice in His First Play

To find the voice that would make him famous as a playwright, Wilson needed to gain distance from his roots. This opportunity came in 1978 when he visited his friend Claude Purdy in St. Paul, Minnesota, and decided to stay there. Purdy urged Wilson to write a play and Wilson felt more ready than ever before. "Having moved from Pittsburgh to St. Paul, I felt I could hear voices for the first time accurately," he told the New York Times. In ten days of writing while sitting in a fish-and-chips restaurant, Wilson finished a draft of Jitney, a play set in a gypsy-cab station. He submitted the play to the Minneapolis Playwrights Center and won a $200-a-month fellowship.

Jitney and Wilson's next work, Fullerton Street, were produced at the Allegheny Repertory Theater in Pittsburgh. Jitney earned Wilson acceptance at the 1982 National Playwrights Conference, where he honed his rewriting skills. Now convinced that he was going somewhere, he quit his job writing scripts for the Science Museum of Minnesota so he could have more time to compose his own works. Financial support was provided primarily by his second wife, Judy Oliver, who was a social worker.

Wilson's breakthrough came with the combination of a good play, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, and a supportive director, Lloyd Richards, artistic director of the Yale Repertory Theater. The play came to Richards's attention at the National Playwrights Conference in 1983. "The talent was unmistakable," Richards told Brown. Ma Rainey's Black Bottom began a long collaboration between the seasoned director and the novice playwright: Richards has gone on to direct all of Wilson's plays. He has also served as spokesperson and promoter for the publicity-shy Wilson, and as the father he never had. Wilson explained their relationship to Shannon: "Another way I look at it, since I love boxing, is that I am the boxer and he is the trainer. He's my trainer--'My boy August will get them.'"

Found Fame with "Ma Rainey"

Ma Rainey's Black Bottom tapped the playwright's interest in the blues and its importance in American black history. He told Newsday in 1987, "I see the blues as a book of literature and it influences everything I do.... Blacks' cultural response to the world is contained in blues." His interest in blues singer Gertrude "Ma" Rainey went back to 1965, when he heard a recording by Bessie Smith, who had taken lessons from Rainey. Set in 1927, the play deals with how black singers were exploited by whites who took in the lion's share of profits generated by these entertainers. Ma Rainey's Black Bottom opened on Broadway at the Cort Theatre in 1984 and was a popular and critical success, running for 275 performances. In his review, Frank Rich of the New York Times called it "a searing inside account of what white racism does to its victims." Critics offered high praise of Wilson's true-to-life dialogue, although some complained that the play was too talky.

Wilson's next play, Joe Turner's Come and Gone, is about a freed black man who comes north to search for his wife, who disappeared during his enslavement. It focuses on the theme of African Americans moving from the agricultural South to a new set of hardships in the industrial cities of the North in the early twentieth century. Joe Turner expresses Wilson's belief that blacks would have been stronger if they had not migrated from country to city, since they came from agrarian roots in Africa. Although the play failed at the box office, many critics loved it. Rich's review in the New York Times in 1986 said that it was "as rich in religious feeling as in historical detail."

Wilson struck gold with Fences, which hit Broadway while Joe Turner was still playing there. Set in the 1950s, its subject is Troy Maxson, a trash collector whose dreams of playing professional baseball were thwarted by white racism. Maxson's bitterness leads him to deny his son the athletic success that was not possible for blacks in the past. The title demonstrates Wilson's concern with choices and responsibility, since fences can keep people in as well as out. Like all of Wilson's characters, Maxson is a complex man who, while having moral lapses, also worked hard to provide for his family. The play, which won the Pulitzer Prize and other awards, opened on Broadway in 1987 with James Earl Jones in the starring role.

When Wilson won the Pulitzer Prize for The Piano Lesson in 1990, he became the seventh playwright to win at least twice. A largely realistic play, The Piano Lesson focuses on a family conflict over an heirloom piano. Berniece Charles's slave ancestors were traded for the piano, and another family member carved African-style portraits of them on it. Later Berniece's father died reclaiming it. Now Berniece's brother Boy Willie wants to sell it to buy farmland, and the issue threatens to tear the family apart. A Time critic hailed it as Wilson's "richest" play yet.

In Two Trains Running, which opened in New York City in 1992, Wilson probed the turbulent era of the late 1960s, when racial strife and the Vietnam War convulsed the nation. While many critics considered the play overly metaphorical and lacking in a strong female character, Rich called it Wilson's "most adventurous and honest attempt to reveal the intimate heart of history" and "a penetrating revelation of a world hidden from view to those outside it." William A. Henry III added in Time magazine that it was "Wilson's most delicate and mature work."

Developed Complex, Dignified Characters

Wilson's plays clearly demonstrate the tensions between blacks who want to hold onto their African heritage and those who want to break away from it. As a result of being pulled in different directions, violence often breaks out among blacks in Wilson's plays, yet that violence is often misdirected. Wilson dramatized this dilemma in Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, when the character Levee stabs a fellow musician who unintentionally stepped on his shoe, instead of attacking the white man who had stolen his music. When Cory Maxson threatens to assail his father with a baseball bat in Fences, he mocks his father's manhood and shows the futility of his past as a Negro baseball player. Wilson devoted his career to dramatizing these tensions within the black community while at the same time upholding the dignity of the individuals as they struggled with their past.

During the early 1990s, Wilson wrote Seven Guitars, a play that takes place during the post-World War II years. Seven Guitars features the story of a blues guitarist, who is murdered, and his circle of friends. The friends gather at the wake, and their stories are told in flashback form. Interestingly, Wilson often introduces characters in his plays that become the main characters in subsequent plays. In Seven Guitars King Hedley was "a cracked old man who sees ghosts" and becomes obsessed with fathering a child, a "new Messiah." Wilson's next play, King Hedley II, takes place in the 1980s. The character King Hedley II is an ex-con who returns home and must deal with his past as well as figure out how to go "ligit." King Hedley II was first seen in the fall of 1999 at the Pittsburgh Public Theater and made it to Broadway in the summer of 2001, playing for twelve weeks. By that time Wilson had already constructed the framework for his next play whose main character, who was alluded to in King Hedley II, is a 366-year-old mystical woman, Aunt Esther.

Aunt Esther presides over Gem of the Ocean, a story about the still oppressive life for former slaves post-Civil War Pittsburgh. Set in the first decade of the twentieth century, it is the predecessor of his other plays. The story weaves an elaborate tale of the ancient Aunt Esther taking Citizen Barlow, who is desperately trying to claim the freedom afforded him by Abraham Lincoln in 1865, on a magical trip in a boat made out of her bill of sale from slavery. It premiered in Chicago in 2003 and made it to Broadway in the winter of 2004, his eighth play to land on the famed avenue in twenty years. Ben Brantley of the New York Times called Gem "a touchstone for everything else he has written."

The last of his 100-year project, Radio Golf, premiered at the Yale Repertory Theater in 2005. Set in the 1990s, Radio Golf concluded his saga with a calling to black Americans to concern themselves with their community. The story involves the efforts two black businessmen as they struggle to navigate the political and economic challenges for the construction of a new commercial development. Wilson discussed his motivation for writing Radio Golf with Suzan-Lori Parks in American Theatre, saying "One of the things with Radio Golf is that I realized I had to in some way deal with the black middle class, which for the most part is not in the other nine plays. My idea was that the black middle class seems to be divorcing themselves from that community, making their fortune on their own without recognizing or acknowledging their connection to the larger community." Critics praised the play as a triumph; artistic director of the Seattle Repertory Theatre David Esbjornson told Variety: "I think it's one of his best pieces." But discussion of the play was overshadowed in the press by public concern for the playwright's health, which had begun to decline during preparations for the play's premiere.

Led Motivated Life

August Wilson had refused to give in to the temptations of Hollywood. He moved to Seattle in 1994, where he focused intently on his play writing. Wilson remarked that he rarely watched television, went to the movies, or even attended plays. His daily routine consisted of writing longhand while sitting in restaurants starting around noon, then typing up his work at night, often until 4:00 a.m. Wilson never let his success alter his work. He told the New York Times: "I always tell people I'm a struggling playwright. I'm struggling to get the next play down on paper." This focus enabled him to be one of the most prolific writers for the American theater.

Diagnosed with inoperable liver cancer in 2005, Wilson died in Seattle on October 2, 2005. The American theater community publicly mourned his passing. ''He was a giant figure in American theater,'' the playwright Tony Kushner said, according to the New York Times. "Heroic is not a word one uses often without embarrassment to describe a writer or playwright, but the diligence and ferocity of effort behind the creation of his body of work is really an epic story." "The death of August Wilson does not simply leave a hole in the American theater," Peter Marks wrote in the Washington Post, "but a huge yawning wound, one that will have to wait to be stitched closed by some expansive, poetic dramatist yet to emerge." In honor of Wilson's achievements, the Virginia Theater on Broadway was renamed the August Wilson Theater on October 17, 2005.

Awards

Pulitzer Prize, best drama, for Fences, 1987, and for The Piano Lesson, 1990; New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, 1984, for Fences, 1987, and for Joe Turner's Come and Gone, 1988; Tony Award, best drama, for Fences, 1986-87; American Theater Critics Award, 1986, 1989, 1990, 1991, 1992, 1998; American Academy of Arts and Letters, inductee, 1995; National Humanities Medal from the President of the United States, 1999; Harold Washington Literary Award, 2001.

Works

Selected writings

• Jitney, first produced at Allegheny Repertory Theatre, Pittsburgh, PA, 1982.
• Fullerton Street, produced at Allegheny Repertory Theater.
• Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, first produced at Yale Repertory Theater, New Haven, CT, 1984; produced on Broadway at Cort Theatre, October, 1984.
• Fences, first produced at Yale Repertory Theater, 1985; produced on Broadway at 46th Street Theatre, March, 1987.
• Joe Turner's Come and Gone, first produced at Yale Repertory Theater, 1986; produced on Broadway at Barrymore Theatre, March, 1988.
• The Piano Lesson, first produced at Yale Repertory Theater, 1987; produced on Broadway at Walter Kerr Theatre, 1990.
• Two Trains Running, first produced at Yale Repertory Theater, 1991; produced on Broadway at Walter Kerr Theatre, 1992.
• Seven Guitars, first produced in 1996.
• King Hedley II, first produced at Pittsburgh Public Theater, 1999.
• Gem of the Ocean, first produced in Chicago, 2003; produced on Broadway at Walter Kerr Theatre, 2004.
• Radio Golf, premiered at the Yale Repertory Theater, 2005.

• Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, New American Library, 1985.
• Fences, New American Library, 1986.
• Joe Turner's Come and Gone, New American Library, 1988.
• The Piano Lesson, Dutton, 1990.
• Three Plays (contains Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, Fences, and Joe Turner's Come and Gone), University of Pittsburgh Press, 1991.
• Two Trains Running, Dutton, 1992.
• Seven Guitars, Dutton, 1996.
• The Ground on which I Stand, New York Theatre Communications Group, 2001.
• Jitney, Overlook Press, 2001.
• King Hedley II, Theatre Communications Group, 2005.

Further Reading

Books

• Bloom, Harold, ed. August Wilson, Chelsea House, 2002.
• Black Literature Criticism, Gale, 1992.
• Contemporary Dramatists, 6th ed. St. James Press, 1999.
• Shannon, Sandra G., The Dramatic Vision of August Wilson, Howard University Press, 1994.
• Snodgrass, Mary Ellen, August Wilson: A Literary Companion, McFarland, 2004.
• Wolfe, Peter, August Wilson, Twayne, 1999.

• African American Review, Vol. 27, No. 4, 1994, pp. 539-59; Spring 2001, p. 93.
• American Theatre, September, 1996, p. 14; May-June 2003, p. 20; November 2005, p. 26.
• American Visions, August 2000, p. 14.
• Chicago Tribune, September 16, 1984, p. 13.
• Commonweal, July 13, 1990, p. 422.
• Contemporary Literature, Spring 1999, p. 1.
• Ebony, September 2001, p. 80.
• Esquire, April 1989, pp. 116-27.
• Essence, August 2001, p. 58.
• Nation, June 11, 1990, p. 832; June 8, 1992, p. 799.
• New Leader, June 3, 1996, p. 23; July, 2001, p. 45.
• New Republic, May 21, 1990, pp. 28-30.
• New Yorker, April 30, 1990, pp. 82-83.
• New York Newsday, March 27, 1987, sec. 2, p. 11; April 20, 1987, p. 47.
• New York Times, October 22, 1984, p. C12; April 15, 1990, pp. B1, B8; April 14, 1992, pp. C13, C17; June 3, 1992, pp. C1, C8; December 7, 2004, p. E1; October 3, 2005, p. A1; October 4, 2005, p. E4.
• New York Times Magazine, March 15, 1987, pp. 36-40, 49, 70; September 10, 1989, pp. 18-19, 58-60.
• People Weekly, May 13, 1996, p. 63.
• St. Louis Dispatch, January 6, 2002, pp. G1, D4.
• Tennessee Tribune, September 22, 2005, p. C10.
• Theater, Fall-Winter 1984, pp. 50-55.
• Time, April 23, 1990, p. 99; April 27, 1992, pp. 65-66; July 9, 2001, p. 84; May 2, 2005, p. 66.
• Variety, October 10-16, 2005, p. 89.
• Washington Post, December 19, 2004, p. N1; October 4, 2005, p. C1.

— Ashyia Henderson, Ed Decker, Christine Miner Minderovic, and Sara Pendergast

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (November 2009)

August Wilson
Born Frederick August Kittel April 27, 1945(1945-04-27) Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA Died October 2, 2005 (aged 60) Seattle, Washington, USA Occupation Author, playwright Nationality United States Spouse Constanza Romero (1994-2005) Judy Oliver (1981-1990) Brenda Burton (1969-1972)
Information
Magnum opus	The Pittsburgh Cycle
Awards	Pulitzer Prize for Drama (1987, 1990)

August Wilson (April 27, 1945 – October 2, 2005) was an American playwright. His literary legacy is the ten play series, The Pittsburgh Cycle, for which he received two Pulitzer Prizes for Drama. Each is set in a different decade, depicting the comic and tragic aspects of the African-American experience in the twentieth century.

Contents 1 Biography 1.1 Childhood 1.2 Education 1.3 Career 1.3.1 The Pittsburgh Cycle 1.3.2 Other plays 1.4 Personal life 2 Legacy 3 Honors and awards 4 References 5 Further reading 6 External links

Biography

Childhood

Wilson was born in the Hill District of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the fourth of six children to German immigrant baker, Frederick August Kittel, Sr. and Daisy Wilson, an African American cleaning woman, from North Carolina. Earlier, Wilson's maternal grandmother walked from North Carolina to Pennsylvania in search of a better life. His mother raised the children alone by the time he was five in a two-room apartment above a grocery store at 1727 Bedford Avenue. The economically depressed neighborhood in which he was raised was inhabited predominantly by black Americans, and Jewish and Italian immigrants. Wilson's mother was remarried to David Bedford in the 1950s when he was a teen, and the family moved from the Hill to the then predominantly white working class neighborhood, Hazelwood where they encountered racial hostility; bricks were thrown through a window at their new home. They were soon forced out of their house and on to their next home.

Education

Wilson was the only African-American student at the Central Catholic High School in 1959 where he was soon driven away by threats and abuse. He then attended Connelley Vocational High School, but found the curriculum unchallenging. He dropped out of Gladstone High School in the 10th grade in 1960 after his teacher accused him of plagiarizing a 20-page paper he wrote on Napoleon I of France. He waited for his teacher and the principal of the school to apologize, but they never did. Wilson hid his decision from his mother because he did not want to disappoint her. At the age of 16, he began working menial jobs and that allowed him to meet a wide variety of people, some of whom he later based his characters on, such as Sam in The Janitor (1985).

Wilson made such extensive use of the Carnegie Library to educate himself that they later awarded him a degree, the only such one they have bestowed. Wilson, who had learned to read at age four, began reading black writers there at age 12 and spent the remainder of his teen years educating himself by reading Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, Arna Bontemps, and others.

Career

By this time, Wilson knew that he wanted to be a writer, but this created tension with his mother, who wanted him to become a lawyer. She forced him to leave the family home and he enlisted in the United States Army for a three-year stint in 1962, but left after one year and went back to working various odd jobs as a porter, short-order cook, gardener, and dishwasher.

August Kittel changed his name to August Wilson to honor his mother after his father's death in 1965. That same year he discovered the blues as sung by Bessie Smith and bought a typewriter for $10.^[1]

In 1968, Wilson co-founded the Black Horizon Theater in the Hill District of Pittsburgh along with his friend Rob Penny. His first play, Recycling, was performed for audiences in small theaters and public housing community centers. Among these early efforts was Jitney which he revised more than two decades later as part of his 10-play cycle on 20th century Pittsburgh.

In 1976 Vernell Lillie, founder of the Kuntu Repertory Theatre at the University of Pittsburgh two years earlier, directed Wilson's The Homecoming. That same year Wilson saw Sizwe Banzi is Dead at the Pittsburgh Public Theater, his first professional play. Wilson, Penny, and poet Maisha Baton also started the Kuntu Writers Workshop to bring African-American writers together and to assist them in publication and production. Both organizations are still active.

In 1978 Wilson moved to Saint Paul, Minnesota at the suggestion of his friend director Claude Purdy, who helped him secure a job writing educational scripts for the Science Museum of Minnesota. In 1980 he received a fellowship for The Playwrights' Center in Minneapolis. Wilson had a long association with the Penumbra Theatre Company of St Paul, which gave the premieres of some Wilson plays.

Wilson received many honorary degrees, including an honorary Doctor of Humanities from the University of Pittsburgh, where he served as a member of the University's Board of Trustees from 1992 until 1995.^[2]

Wilson's best known plays are Fences (1985) (which won a Pulitzer Prize and a Tony Award), The Piano Lesson (1990) (a Pulitzer Prize and the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award), Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, and Joe Turner's Come and Gone.

In 1994 Wilson left St Paul for Seattle, where he would develop a relationship with Seattle Repertory Theatre. Seattle Rep would ultimately be the only theater in the country to produce all of the works in his ten-play cycle and his one-man show How I Learned What I Learned.

The Pittsburgh Cycle

Wilson's "Pittsburgh Cycle," also often referred to as his "Century Cycle," consists of ten plays—nine of which are set in Pittsburgh's Hill District, an African-American neighborhood that takes on a mythic literary significance like Thomas Hardy's Wessex, William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County, or Irish playwright Brian Friel's Ballybeg. The plays are each set in a different decade and aim to sketch the Black experience in the 20th century.

Although the plays of the cycle are not strictly connected to the degree of a serial story, some characters appear (at various ages) in more than one of the cycle's plays. Children of characters in earlier plays may appear in later plays. The character most frequently mentioned in the cycle is Aunt Ester, a "washer of souls". She is reported to be 285 years old in Gem of the Ocean, which takes place in her home at 1839 Wylie Avenue, and 322 in Two Trains Running. She dies in 1985, during the events of King Hedley II. Much of the action of Radio Golf revolves around the plan to demolish and redevelop that house, some years after her death. The plays often include an apparently mentally-impaired oracular character (different in each play)—for example, Hedley [Sr.] in Seven Guitars, Gabriel in Fences or Hambone in Two Trains Running.

• 1900s - Gem of the Ocean (2003)
• 1910s - Joe Turner's Come and Gone (1988)
• 1920s - Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (1984) - set in Chicago
• 1930s - The Piano Lesson (1990) - Pulitzer Prize^[3]
• 1940s - Seven Guitars (1995)
• 1950s - Fences (1987) - Pulitzer Prize^[3]
• 1960s - Two Trains Running (1991)
• 1970s - Jitney (1982)
• 1980s - King Hedley II (1999)
• 1990s - Radio Golf (2005)

Other plays

• Black Bart and the Sacred Hills, 1977 (produced St. Paul, 1981)
• How I Learned What I Learned (2002-03, Seattle)

Personal life

Wilson was married three times. His first marriage was to Brenda Burton from 1969 to 1972. They had one daughter, Sakina Ansari, born 1970. In 1981 he was married to Judy Oliver, a social worker, and divorced in 1990. Wilson's third marriage was in 1994 to costume designer, Constanza Romero, with whom he had his second daughter, Azula Carmen.

Wilson reported that he had been diagnosed with liver cancer in June 2005 and been given three to five months to live. He died on October 2, 2005 at Swedish Medical Center in Seattle, and was interred at Greenwood Cemetery, Pittsburgh on October 8, 2005.

Legacy

Wilson's childhood home at 1727 Bedford Avenue in Pittsburgh

The childhood home of Wilson and his five siblings, at 1727 Bedford Avenue in Pittsburgh was declared a historic landmark by the State of Pennyslvania on May 30, 2007.^[4]

In Pittsburgh, there is an August Wilson Center for African American Culture.

On October 16, 2005, fourteen days after Wilson's death, the Virginia Theatre in New York City's Broadway theatre district was renamed the August Wilson Theatre. It is the first Broadway theatre to bear the name of an African-American.^[5]

The vacated Republican Street between Warren Avenue N. and 2nd Avenue N. on the Seattle Center grounds has been renamed August Wilson Way.^[6]

Honors and awards

• 1985: New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play – Ma Rainey's Black Bottom
• 1987: Drama Desk Award for Outstanding New Play – Fences
• 1987: New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play – Fences
• 1987: Pulitzer Prize for Drama – Fences
• 1987: Tony Award for Best Play – Fences
• 1988: Literary Lion Award from the New York Public Library
• 1988: New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play – Joe Turner's Come and Gone
• 1990: Drama Desk Award for Outstanding New Play – The Piano Lesson
• 1990: New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play – The Piano Lesson
• 1990: Pulitzer Prize for Drama – The Piano Lesson
• 1992: American Theatre Critics' Association Award – Two Trains Running
• 1992: New York Drama Critics Circle Citation for Best American Play – Two Trains Running
• 1996: New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play – Seven Guitars
• 1999: National Humanities Medal
• 2000: New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play – Jitney
• 2000: Outer Critics Circle Award for Outstanding Off-Broadway Play – Jitney
• 2002: Olivier Award for Best new Play – Jitney
• 2004: The 10th Annual Heinz Award in Arts and Humanities^[7]
• 2004: The U.S. Comedy Arts Festival Freedom of Speech Award
• 2005: Make Shift Award at the U.S. Confederation of Play Writers

References

1. ^ August Wilson. Interview with Bonnie Lyons; George Plimpton. The Art of Theatre No. 14 (Transcript/.PDF). The Paris Review, Issue 153. Winter 1999. Retrieved on 2008-10-05.
2. ^ Bruce Steele (10 October 2005). "Remembering August Wilson 1945-2005". The Pitt Chronicle (The University of Pittsburgh). Archived from the original on 2009-09-30. http://web.archive.org/web/20060902071459/http://www.umc.pitt.edu/media/pcc051010/august_wilson_2005OCT10.html. Retrieved 2008-10-01. 
3. ^ ^{a b} http://www.pulitzer.org/bycat/Drama
4. ^ The Associated Press (31 May 2007). "State Memorializes August Wilson's Childhood Home". Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/news/breaking/s_510207.html. Retrieved 2008-10-03. 
5. ^ Jesse McKinley (2 September 2005). "Theater Is to Be Renamed for a Dying Playwright". The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/02/nyregion/02theater.html?scp=6. Retrieved 2008-12-21. 
6. ^ Kathy Mulady (12 June 2007). "Visions For a New Seattle Center Being Made Public". The Seattle Post-Intelligencer. http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/319432_center12.html. Retrieved 2008-10-05. 
7. ^ The Heinz Awards, August Wilson profile

Further reading

• Conner, Lynne (2007). Pittsburgh in Stages: Two Hundred Years of Theater. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. ISBN 9780822943303. 
• Elkins, Marilyn Roberson (2000). August Wilson: A Casebook. New York: Garland. ISBN 0815336349. 
• Shannon, Sandra Garrett (1995). The Dramatic Vision of August Wilson. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press. ISBN 0882580698. 
• Shannon, Sandra Garrett (2004). August Wilson and Black Aesthetics. Palgrave MacMillan. ISBN 1403964068. 
• Shannon, Sandra Garrett (2003). August Wilson's Fences: A Reference Guide. Westport: Greenwood Press. ISBN 0313318808. 

External links

• Media related to August Wilson at Wikimedia Commons
• August Wilson at Find a Grave
• August Wilson at the Internet Broadway Database
• August Wilson at the Internet Movie Database
• August Wilson at the Internet Off-Broadway Database
• August Wilson Theatre Broadway
• Pittsburgh Post-Gazette obituary
• New York Times obituary
• Post-Gazette special index on August Wilson
• NPR Intersections: August Wilson, Writing to the Blues audio interview
• Theater Is to Be Renamed for a Dying Playwright
• A detailed biography at AfricanAmericans.com
• The Paris Review Interview with August Wilson
• August Wilson Center for African American Culture
• August Wilson's Radio Golf on Broadway
• BroadwayWorld Article: Kennedy Center Presents: 'August Wilson's 20th Century' Cast & Dates
• The Faster Times article in Davi Napoleon's Theater Talk. Against Method Directing: Why Bart Sher Can Direct August Wilson
• Comprehensive August Wilson fansite
• http://www.believermag.com/issues/200411/?read=interview_wilson
• Putting Up Fences, article with video, Sept 17, 2009
• http://www.berkeleyrep.org/season/0809/jt_archive_program.asp#one
• http://www.lct.org/talksLctReviewIssue.htm?id=5

v • d • e Pulitzer Prize for Drama Michael Bennett / Nicholas Dante / James Kirkwood, Jr. / Marvin Hamlisch / Edward Kleban (1976) · Michael Cristofer (1977) · Donald L. Coburn (1978) · Sam Shepard (1979) · Lanford Wilson (1980) · Beth Henley (1981) · Charles Fuller (1982) · Marsha Norman (1983) · David Mamet (1984) · James Lapine / Stephen Sondheim (1985) · August Wilson (1987) · Alfred Uhry (1988) · Wendy Wasserstein (1989) · August Wilson (1990) · Neil Simon (1991) · Robert Schenkkan (1992) · Tony Kushner (1993) · Edward Albee (1994) · Horton Foote (1995) · Jonathan Larson (1996) · Paula Vogel (1998) · Margaret Edson (1999) · Donald Margulies (2000) Complete list: (1918-1925) · (1926-1950) · (1951-1975) · (1976-2000) · (2001-present)

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