Playwright, born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA. A writer who never finished high school, he won two Pulitzer Prizes for his cycle of plays, which depict the African-American experience in America: Fences (1987) and The Piano Lesson (1988). Later works include Two Trains Running (1990), Seven Guitars (1996), and King Hedley II (1999). He founded Minnesota's Black Horizons Theater Company in 1968. His Ma Rainey's Black Bottom won a New York Drama Critics Circle Award in 19845. Radio Golf, the last of the 10 plays in his 20th-c cycle, premiered in 2005.
August Wilson (April 27, 1945 – October 2, 2005) was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American playwright. His singular achievement and literary legacy is a cycle of ten plays, each set in a different decade, depicting the comedy and tragedy of the African American experience in the 20th century.
Biography
Early life
Born Frederick August Kittel Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania's Hill District, Wilson was the fourth of seven children of a German immigrant baker, also named Frederick August Kittel, who seldom spent time with his family, and an African American cleaning woman, Daisy Wilson, from North Carolina.
Wilson was the only black student at Central Catholic High School in 1959;
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 awarded.
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.
Adult life
August Kittel changed his name to August Wilson to honor his mother when his father died in 1965.
In 1968, Wilson co-founded the Black Horizon Theater in the Hill District of Pittsburgh along with fellow resident Rob Penny, who went on to become associate professor of Africana studies at the University of Pittsburgh. desperate for space, they staged many of their plays in elementary school auditoriums and community centers.
Wilson's first marriage was to Brenda Burton in 1969.
In 1976 Dr. Vernell Lillie, who had founded the Kuntu Repertory Theatre two years earlier, directed Wilson's The Homecoming. That same year Wilson saw Sizwe Bansi Is Dead at the Pittsburgh Public Theater, his first professional play.
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.
Death
On August 26, 2005, he told his hometown newspaper, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, that he had been diagnosed with liver cancer in June of 2005 and given 3 to 5 months to live.
On October 16, 2005, only 14 days after Wilson's death, the Virginia Theatre in New York's Broadway theatre district was renamed the August Wilson Theatre.
Literary works
Wilson's most famous 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.
The Pittsburgh Cycle
In 2005, August Wilson completed a ten-play cycle, nine of which are set in Pittsburgh, chronicling the African-American experience in the 20th century. These are:
1900s - Gem of the Ocean (2003) 1910s - Joe Turner's Come and Gone (1984) 1920s - Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (1982) - set in Chicago 1930s - The Piano Lesson (1986) - Pulitzer Prize 1940s - Seven Guitars (1995) 1950s - Fences (1985) - Pulitzer Prize 1960s - Two Trains Running (1990) 1970s - Jitney (1982) 1980s - King Hedley II (2001) 1990s - Radio Golf (2005)Although the plays 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 plays often include an apparently mentally-impaired oracular character (different in each play) - for example, Hedley [Sr.] in Seven Guitars, or Hambone in Two Trains Running.
User Comments Add a comment…