August Wilson

Playwright

• Born: April 27, 1945
• Birthplace: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
• Died: October 2, 2005
• Place of death: Seattle, Washington

A celebrated playwright, Wilson received critical acclaim for his ambitious cycle of works about African American life in the twentieth century. One of the few playwrights to win two Pulitzer Prizes, Wilson also was the first African American to have two plays running simultaneously on Broadway.

Early Life

August Wilson was born Frederick August Kittel in Pittsburgh to Frederick August Kittel, a German baker, and Daisy Wilson, an African American cleaner. The fourth of six children, he grew up in a poor household. Wilson had little contact with his biological father and as an adult he adopted his mother’s maiden name. After his parents divorced, Wilson was raised by his African American stepfather, David Bedford. The family moved to a predominantly white suburb where Wilson experienced racism at school. He dropped out after ninth grade and continued his education in the local public library, where books by Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, and Richard Wright inspired him to become a writer. While working at odd jobs, he spent time in Pittsburgh’s Hill District, a predominantly black neighborhood. This area would later provide inspiration for the characters and dialogue in his plays.

In 1963, Wilson enlisted in the Army but managed to have himself discharged after a year. He bought his first typewriter in 1965 and began to write poems, some of which were published in small magazines. Wilson was active in the Black Power movement. Along with Rob Penny, a playwright and teacher, he founded the Black Horizon Theater in Pittsburgh, where he directed plays by the writer and activist Amiri Baraka. Wilson married Brenda Burton, a member of the Nation of Islam, in 1969. They had one daughter but were divorced in 1972.

Life’s Work

Never very successful as a poet, Wilson was encouraged to write plays by his friend Claude Purdy from the Playwrights Center in Minneapolis. Wilson’s early attempts at drama were very poetic and he found it hard to write convincing dialogue. Purdy encouraged Wilson to give his characters voices he recalled from conversations in the Hill District of Pittsburgh.

Wilson’s first play, Recycle (1973), examines the breakup of a marriage. His second, The Homecoming (1976), based on the mysterious death of the blues guitarist Blind Lemon Jefferson, prefigured some of the themes of his later work Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (1984). In interviews, Wilson cited as influences for his plays the “four b’s”—the blues, the writers Baraka and Jorge Luis Borges, and the painter Romare Bearden. Baraka stressed that all art is political and can be used in the struggle for equality, while the scenes of black life depicted in Bearden’s work provided the inspiration for some of Wilson’s plays. The fiction of Argentinean writer Borges taught Wilson that writing could be specific to a time and place yet still reflect universal themes. The influence of the blues is evident in the ideas and characters in Wilson’s plays.

Wilson moved to St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1978 to work as scriptwriter at the Science Museum. He wrote a draft of Jitney, a play about life in a gypsy cab station. Jitney and his next play, Fullerton Street, were both produced in Pittsburgh in 1982. It was only after Wilson submitted Jitney to the Playwrights Center in Minneapolis and won a fellowship that he began to consider himself a serious playwright. With the support of his second wife, Judy Oliver, a social worker whom he married in 1981, he was able to quit his job and concentrate on writing plays.

Another important figure in his career was Lloyd Richards, the director and dean of the Yale University School of Drama. Wilson submitted Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom to the National Playwrights Conference, where it came to Richards’s attention. Recognizing Wilson’s talent, Richards helped him refine the play, which was produced in 1984 in New Haven. Later the same year, it opened on Broadway, where it was enthusiastically received by the critics. This launched Wilson’s chronicle of twentieth century African American life; ten plays, each set in a different decade, which became known as the Pittsburgh Cycle. Gem of the Ocean (2003) is set in 1904, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone (1986) in 1911, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (1984) in 1927, The Piano Lesson (1987) in 1936, Seven Guitars (1995) in 1948, Fences (1985) in 1957, Two Trains Running (1990) in 1969, Jitney (1982) in 1977, King Hedley II (1999) in 1985, and Radio Golf (2005) in 1997. Each play explores issues the daily lives of African Americans at a particular time and place as well as universal themes such as love, honor, betrayal, and duty. His characters are ordinary people and the plots grow out of the characterization.

Wilson followed up the success of Ma Rainey with two more plays, both of which won Pulitzer Prizes. Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, set in a black boardinghouse in 1911, deals with the uncertainty of newly freed African American migrants from the South, like Wilson’s grandmother. Fences’ main character is a trash collector and former Negro League baseball player who is prevented from playing professional baseball by white racism. The character is loosely based on Wilson’s stepfather. The play opened on Broadway in 1987 with James Earl Jones in the starring role and won a Tony Award.

In 1994, Wilson moved to Seattle with his third wife, Constanza Romero, a costume designer with whom he had a daughter. He continued to set his plays in his hometown, Pittsburgh. An autobiographical play, How I Learned What I Learned, in which Wilson starred, was produced in 2003. During preparations for the premiere of his last play, Radio Golf, Wilson’s health began to decline. He died at age sixty of liver cancer.

Significance

Wilson was a champion of independent black theater and race-specific casting, but he brought African American themes and what he described as an African consciousness to mainstream theater. His plays present a history of America from an African American viewpoint, exploring how ordinary individuals cope with racism and the legacy of slavery. Although he dramatizes tensions within the black community, rather than simply being works of protest Wilson’s plays reveal the dignity of individuals struggling to overcome their past. The plays won many awards, including two Pulitzer Prizes, a Tony Award, seven New York Drama Critics Circle Awards, and a Laurence Olivier Award for Jitney in London in 2001.

Bibliography

Bigsby, Christopher. The Cambridge Companion to August Wilson. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Examines Wilson’s life and career and the wider context of his plays. A chapter is devoted to each play in the Pittsburgh Cycle.

Bryer, Jackson R., and Mary C. Hartig, eds. Conversations with August Wilson. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2006. A selection of interviews Wilson gave from 1984 to 2004 in which the playwright discusses his plays and his background.

Elkins, Marilyn, ed. August Wilson: A Casebook. New York: Routledge, 2000. This collection of essays and interviews with the playwright covers Wilson’s influences, politics, folklore, Africa, gender, and the blues.

Snodgrass, Mary Ellen. August Wilson: A Literary Companion. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2004. Examines the characters, dates, events, and themes from Wilson’s theatrical output and includes an annotated chronology of his life and works.