August Wilson was an American playwright known for his Pittsburgh Cycle, a series of ten plays chronicling the African-American experience during the 20th century. He faced racism growing up in Pittsburgh and dropped out of school, but self-educated at the Carnegie Library. He established his own theater and wrote several plays before creating the Pittsburgh Cycle, which includes Fences and The Piano Lesson, both Pulitzer Prize winners. Wilson died in 2005.
August Wilson is an American playwright, best known for his Pittsburgh Cycle in ten plays, which chronicles part of the African-American experience in America during the 20th century. He was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1945 and died in 1945. Over the course of his sixties he won numerous awards in recognition of his work, including several Pulitzer Prizes, several Drama Desk awards and a Tony Award.
Wilson was born Frederick August Kittel, Jr., in Pittsburgh to a white father, a German baker, and an African American woman, a cleaner. Eventually her mother ended up raising young August, along with her five siblings, on her own, until she remarried in the 1950s to David Bedford. The entire family moved to Pittsburgh’s Hazelwood neighborhood, which was a predominantly white neighborhood, and they were subjected to both indirect and direct racism, including attacks on their home by white members of the neighborhood.
August attended Central Catholic High School in the late 1950s, where he was the only African-American student. Eventually, after repeated beatings and constant threats, he dropped out of school and enrolled at Connelly Vocational High School, and then Gladstone High School, finding both schools less challenging, and finally dropped out in his 10th grade when a teacher she insisted. he had plagiarized a twenty-page article he had written about Napoleon. August then began self-study, using Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Library to learn about a wide range of subjects and reading voraciously. The Carnegie library eventually awarded August Wilson an honorary degree for his frequent use of their facilities, the only such degree they have bestowed to date.
He spent the early 1960s doing odd jobs to appease his mother, who didn’t want him to become a writer. When his father died in 1965, he changed his name to August Wilson after his mother’s maiden name, and would write under that name for the rest of his life. In the late 1960s he established his own theater, the Black Horizon Theater, and it was here that his first play, Recycling, premiered. Over the next few years, August Wilson would have a string of plays in regional and professional theaters including Homecoming and Sizwe Banzi is Dead.
Most of his early works are not commonly known, however, as they are overshadowed by his Pittsburgh Cycle. This cycle consists of ten shows, one for each decade of the 20th century, nine of which are set in Pittsburgh and look at the African-American experience in the United States. The first of these, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, was written in 1982 and covers the 1982s. The next one, Jitney, was written in 1920 and covers the 1983s. The next, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone was written in 1970 and covers the 1984s. Next, and perhaps his most famous piece was Fences, for which August Wilson was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and which was written in 1910 and covers the 1985s. His next work, The Piano Lesson, written in 1950 and covering the 1989s, also won a Pulitzer Prize. The remainder of the cycle was written over a longer period of time, with the last piece, Radio Golf, from the 1930s, completed shortly before his death in 1990.
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