August+Wilson

August Wilson considered contact with one’s roots to be a crucial source of strength, and his plays have explored and celebrated African American culture. Wilson’s plays also acknowledge the white racism that has marked African American history. Black experience in America contains, Wilson noted, “all the universalities.” His work has received wide acclaim, winning Pulitzers and numerous other awards.

Wilson’s father was a white baker from Germany, and his mother was a black cleaning woman who had moved to Pittsburgh from rural North Carolina. His father “wasn’t around much,” according to Wilson, and he and his brothers and sisters grew up in a financially strapped single-parent household “in a cultural environment which was black.” At age twelve Wilson discovered and read through the small “Negro section” of the public library.

In 1965, he decided to become a writer and adopted his mother’s maiden name, becoming August Wilson (which he legally formalized in the early 1970’s) instead of Frederick August Kittel. He began living on his own in a rooming house in the black area of Pittsburgh, known as the Hill, while writing poetry and supporting himself in a series of menial jobs. In 1965, he also discovered the blues, which he acknowledged as “the greatest source of my inspiration.” Wilson identified three other B’s as influences: [|Amiri Baraka], some of whose plays Wilson directed in the 1960’s at the Black Horizons Theater Company that Wilson cofounded; the art of [|Romare Bearden], noted for his collages of black life; and the stories of Argentinean author [|Jorge Luis Borges]. In addition, he claimed that most of the plays he has seen have been by South African playwright [|Athol Fugard].

In 1978, Wilson moved to St. Paul, Minnesota, where, surrounded by white voices, he began to create characters who spoke a poeticized version of the black English he had heard on the Hill. Lloyd Richards—then dean of the Yale School of Drama—directed Wilson’s first major dramatic success, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, and began a long-term working relationship with Wilson, who viewed Richards as a father figure and professional mentor, with insight into Wilson’s plays because of his own roots in black culture.

After Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom Wilson realized he had written three plays set in different decades and decided to complete a historical cycle, with a play for each decade of the twentieth century. He has used Pittsburgh as a setting for his plays after Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (which is set in Chicago), causing him to be compared to fiction writers James Joyce (who used Dublin) and William Faulkner (who used the area around Oxford, Mississippi). Wilson completed his cycle of plays before his death from liver cancer in 2005.

Jack Vincent Barbera. "August Wilson." Magill’s Choice: American Ethnic Writers. Salem Press, 2000. eNotes.com. 2006. 6 Sep, 2008 