August Wilson

He was born Frederick August Kittel Jr. in Pittsburgh's Hill District, son of a German immigrant baker who was rarely home and an African American mother, Daisy Wilson, who raised six children largely alone. When the family later moved to a mostly white neighborhood, someone threw a brick through their window. At fifteen, a teacher accused him of plagiarizing a paper on Napoleon, certain a Black student could not have written it that well -- Wilson refused to defend himself, walked out, and never returned to a classroom. He hid the truancy from his mother for nearly a year and spent his days at the Carnegie Library, reading Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, and Langston Hughes. He later dropped his father's surname and began writing as August Wilson.

Wilson wrote ten plays, one set in each decade of the twentieth century, nine of them in the Hill District he grew up in: Gem of the Ocean, Joe Turner's Come and Gone, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, The Piano Lesson, Seven Guitars, Fences, Two Trains Running, Jitney, King Hedley II, and Radio Golf. He called the blues his real education and built the cycle less as chronological history than as variations on one unresolved question: what freedom actually costs the people who won it. Fences won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the Tony Award for Best Play in 1987 -- The Piano Lesson won a second Pulitzer in 1990. Nearly all ten plays reached Broadway, several with Denzel Washington and Viola Davis leading the casts, an unmatched run for one dramatist writing almost entirely about one neighborhood.

Wilson argued, loudly and in public, that Black theater needed its own institutions rather than assimilation into a white-run regional system, laying out the case in a 1996 speech called "The Ground on Which I Stand" that accused colorblind casting of erasing culture rather than transcending it. He debated critic Robert Brustein about it on a New York stage the next year, splitting the American theater world for years. And yet nearly every one of his own plays built its reputation inside exactly the institutions he was criticizing, financed overwhelmingly by white-led regional theaters and eventually Broadway, because that was where the money and the audiences were. He married three times -- Brenda Burton, Judy Oliver, and finally costume designer Constanza Romero, who survived him -- and by his own account gave the plays the attention the marriages needed.

Diagnosed with inoperable liver cancer in June 2005 and given three to five months, Wilson died that October at sixty, with the cycle's tenth play, Radio Golf, still in its first run. Two weeks later, Broadway renamed the Virginia Theatre the August Wilson Theatre, the first Broadway house named for a Black artist. Pittsburgh built a cultural center in his name, the Postal Service put him on a stamp in 2021, and Denzel Washington spent the following decade turning the cycle into film, directing and starring in Fences in 2016 and producing Ma Rainey's Black Bottom in 2020. The argument Wilson started about who gets to build and run Black theater in America did not end with him.

August Wilson's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Ma Rainey's Black Bottom other
  Wilson's Broadway debut -- set in 1927 1984
• Fences other
  Pulitzer Prize for Drama and Tony Award, Best Play -- set in 1957 1987
• Joe Turner's Come and Gone other
  Set in 1911 1988
• The Piano Lesson other
  Second Pulitzer Prize for Drama -- set in 1936 1990
• "The Ground on Which I Stand" speech
  Delivered at the Theatre Communications Group conference 1996

• April 27, 1945 aged 0 Born Frederick August Kittel Jr. in Pittsburgh's Hill District
• 1960 aged ~15 Leaves school at fifteen and begins self-education at the Carnegie Library
• 1984 aged ~39 Ma Rainey's Black Bottom opens on Broadway
• 1987 aged ~42 Fences wins the Pulitzer Prize and the Tony Award
• 1990 aged ~45 The Piano Lesson wins a second Pulitzer Prize
• 1996 aged ~51 Delivers "The Ground on Which I Stand" Debates critic Robert Brustein about it in New York the following year.
• June 2005 aged 60 Diagnosed with inoperable liver cancer
• October 2, 2005 aged 60 Dies in Seattle at 60
• October 16, 2005 aged 60 Broadway's Virginia Theatre is renamed the August Wilson Theatre The first Broadway theater named for a Black artist.

• Denzel Washington b. 1954
  Academy Award-winning actor and director regarded as one of the greatest actors of his generation. adapted his plays for film
• Arthur Miller 1915–2005
  Playwright whose Death of a Salesman and The Crucible are cornerstones of American drama. compared to
• Romare Bearden 1911–1988
  Artist who used collage to depict African American life and culture in the 20th century. influenced by
• Bessie Smith 1892–1937
  Leading blues recording artist of the 1920s known as the Empress of the Blues. blues influence cited by him