August Wilson (April 27, 1945 – October 2, 2005), original name Frederick August Kittel, was a Pulitzer Prize winning playwright, known for his cycle of plays. Each of these were set in a different decade of the 20th century and details the African American experience, both comic and tragic. He was a high school dropout, a Black Power activist in the 1960s and the most accomplished of all African American dramatists in the last half of the 20th century.
His mother, Daisy Wilson, a black women, raised Wilson and five siblings in the Hill District of Pittsburgh, the setting for most of his plays. His father, Frederick August Kittel, a white man, left them. Daisy Wilson remarried, a black man named David Bedford, and moved the family to Hazelwood, a suburb of Pittsburgh in 1958. For the most part, the Hill District was black and Hazelwood predominantly white. At age 15 after being accused of plagiarizing a paper he quit school and utilized the public library for reading and self-education. He also frequented the Hill District to learn from the residents. He changed his last name from Kittel to Wilson.
He became involved with the Black Arts movement in the late 1960s and in 1968 was co-founder and director of the Black Horizons Theatre which is located in Pittsburgh. Wilson is a published poet, writing for Black World (1971) and Black Lines (1972). He relocated to St. Paul, Minnesota in 1978 and wrote several plays in the early 1980s. His first produced play was Jitney (1982), which depicted cab drivers of the 1970s and was published in 2000.
Wilson’s 20th-century cycle began with Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. This was his first major play and opened on Broadway in 1984. Set in 1927 in Chicago, and portrays a verbally abusive blues singer, her fellow black musicians, and their white manager, was a financial success. First produced in 1985 and published in 1986, Fences, deals with a conflict between a 1950s father and son. This play received a Tony Award for best play, a film adaptation was released in 2016.
His narration of the black American experience continued with Joe Turner’s Come and Gone (produced in 1986), and characterizes the lives of residents of a boardinghouse in 1911 in the Hill District of Pittsburgh.The boarders come looking for a home, looking for family, looking for opportunity in a post-slavery world that, for many of them, holds no place for their lives, their dreams, or their songs.
Part of his Century Plays, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone was playwright August Wilson’s favorite, saying,
“After I wrote it, I said to myself: ‘If I die tomorrow, I have fulfilled myself as an artist.‘”
Other plays include The Piano Lesson (produced in 1987) set in the 1930s and explores a family’s ambivalence about selling an heirloom; it was adapted for television in 1995. Two Trains Running, first produced in 1990, takes place in a coffeehouse in the 1960s. The 7th play of the cycle, Seven Guitars, produced in 1995, is set among a group of friends who reunite in 1948 following the death of a local blues guitarist. King Hedley II (produced 1999), and Gem of the Ocean (produced 2003), continued to excite the admiration of critics and viewers alike. 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.
During his career Wilson received numerous honors 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 honor. The August Wilson Center for African American Culture opened in Pittsburgh in 2009.