August Wilson

Born Frederick August Kittel, Jr., on April 27, 1945, to Daisy Wilson and Frederick Kittel, "Freddy" spent his childhood in the Hill district of Pittsburgh, an ethnically diverse neighborhood where his family lived in two rooms with an outdoor toilet and no hot water. His father, a German immigrant, was married to another woman at the time and was uninvolved in his upbringing, thus in time he changed his name to August Wilson. Daisy, a housecleaner, supported Wilson and his siblings. When he was a teenager, she paired with David Bedford, a sanitation worker. 

Experiences in Freddy Kittel’s youth shaped the playwright August Wilson became. His mother fostered his love of words and provided a powerful example. When he was a child, she read to him often and brought him to the Carnegie Library’s Wylie Avenue branch to get him a borrower’s card. In terms of Daisy’s moral influence, Wilson vividly remembered when she won a new Speed Queen washing machine. Upon finding out that she was Black, the contest organizers tried to persuade her to accept a second-hand appliance instead. She explained to her children that "something is not always better than nothing," refused the lesser prize, and saved to buy a new washer for herself. Because of her, Wilson embraced his African American heritage and emulated her sense of dignity (Hartigan 28-29). 

Education became an important arena for cultivating and demonstrating self-worth. Wilson attended Holy Trinity School and St. Richard’s School; when parts of the Hill District were demolished and redeveloped, the family moved to the Hazelwood neighborhood. He attended various schools in Pittsburgh, including St. Stephen’s, Central Catholic High School, and Clifford B. Connelley Trade School. He often encountered racism and low academic expectations that prompted him to switch institutions. Finally, at Gladstone High School, a teacher accused Wilson of plagiarizing an excellent paper he had written about Napoleon Bonaparte. Rather than trying to prove himself, he quit school altogether. For several years, he continued to educate himself through the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, reading material by and about African Americans. Writings by Countee Cullen, Paul Lawrence Dunbar, and Langston Hughes encouraged him to write poetry. Works by Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, and James Baldwin were also memorable. Along the way, Wilson was exposed to the work of Jorge Luis Borges, who taught him that "you can be specific as to a time and place and culture and still have the work resonate with the universal themes of love, honor, duty, betrayal, etc." (Lyons and Plimpton 74). 

Wilson spent much of his twenties finding his creative voice. Although he remained in Pittsburgh, he moved out of his mother’s home and bought a typewriter. Following Frederick Kittel’s death in 1965, he dropped his father’s given name, emphasized his middle name, and adopted his mother’s surname, solidifying an identity as August Wilson. Besides working a series of menial jobs, he wrote poetry and befriended other Pittsburgh-area authors, including Rob Penny. At the time, his work was inspired by Dylan Thomas and other Western writers, but he frequented the Crawford Grill, Eddie’s Restaurant, a pool hall called Pat’s Place, and other locations on the Hill. He listened intently to African Americans’ conversations and stories, though he did not work them into his writings until much later. 

Black Power and Black Arts were ascendent in Pittsburgh in the 1960s-1970s and some of these movements’ ideas influenced Wilson. Through reading Malcolm X and other Black nationalists, he developed firmer beliefs about the importance of self-determination. Other creatives such as Leroi Jones/Amiri Bakara and Ed Bullins were portraying Black experiences through their art, inspiring Wilson to use his own talents to celebrate and affirm their stories. Another crucial discovery he made was blues music. At Pittsburgh’s St. Vincent de Paul second-hand store, he uncovered a collection of old records that changed the trajectory of his work. As he later told an interviewer:

I think the blues is the best literature that we blacks have created since we’ve been here, and it’s a lot of philosophical ideas in there. I call it our sacred book. And so what I’ve attempted to do is to mine that field, to mine those cultural ideas and attitudes and, and give them to my characters (August Wilson: The Ground On Which I Stand [documentary].) 

In songs like Bessie Smith’s "Nobody Can Bake a Sweet Jelly Roll Like Mine," Wilson heard persistence and confidence that "connected him to the past" and helped him "appreciate Black culture on its own terms" (Hartigan 60-61). Although he was not a musician himself, the genre later became central in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. Specific songs inspired the titles of at least two other plays—Joe Turner’s Come and Gone and Two Trains Running.  Musical instruments figured in at least two more—The Piano Lesson and Seven Guitars. Joan Herrington, Patrick Maley, and other scholars have argued that the blues influenced his plays’ ethos, humor, and structures, as well. 

While Wilson was initially attracted to Baraka’s poetry, he was subsequently inspired by theater groups Baraka started in Newark and New York. As Wilson later told interviewer George Plimpton for The Paris Review, he recognized the stage’s ability to "communicate ideas and extol virtues," while offering a venue for many people to "bear witness" and share the same experience (Lyons and Plimpton 69). With Rob Penny and others, Wilson founded Black Horizons Theater in Pittsburgh. Although he had little experience with plays, he became the director because no one else stepped forward. At first, the group offered its events in A. Leo Weil Elementary School. Later, they joined with the Kuntu Repertory Theater, an organization founded by Vernell A. Lillie at the University of Pittsburgh that focused on Black life from historical and social perspectives. In connection with the theater, Wilson, Penny, and Maisha Baton founded Kuntu Writer’s Workshop, which supported African American authors and productions. Around the same time, Wilson began to develop characters and scenes that drew from the observations, writings, and music he had encountered up to that point. Most importantly, in 1976 he began to write Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, a play about a legendary blues singer which later became part of his ten-play cycle.

Claude Purdy, whom Wilson had met on the University of Pittsburgh campus, was an important catalyst to his career. Purdy had far more experience with playwriting and recognized Wilson’s potential. When he became the new artistic director of the Penumbra, a Black theater company in St. Paul, Minnesota, he encouraged Wilson to join him there. Wilson’s earliest plays were eclectic in subject matter, but relocating to a city with a much smaller African American population helped Wilson develop an even deeper appreciation for everyday voices and scenes in Pittsburgh. Jitney, which later became part of Wilson’s cycle, had its beginnings in the late 1970s in St. Paul and was the first to directly utilize Wilson’s experiences in his hometown. 

With Purdy’s and Rob Penny’s encouragement, Wilson sought professional opportunities to hone his craft. He earned a fellowship at the Playwright’s Center in Minneapolis that helped bring Jitney to fruition. Opening in October 1982 at the Fine Line Cultural Center in Oakland (Pittsburgh) it was Wilson’s first successful play. His success grew further after he and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom were accepted for the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center’s National Playwrights Conference, where Lloyd Richards, a pioneering African American director and the Dean of Yale’s drama school, was the artistic director. Richards led workshops and staged readings that improved Wilson’s work, especially by encouraging him to trim his writing, which tended to be overlong. Wilson also won a coveted, seven-year (1982-1989) residency at New Dramatists, an organization in New York that supported emerging playwrights. As a result of these opportunities, Ma Rainey was Wilson’s first play to appear on Broadway. It garnered several Tony Awards and won the New York Critics Circle’s award for Best Play in 1985.

Having written plays set in different decades, Wilson conceived of writing a ten-play cycle, each depicting African American life during a different decade of the twentieth century. He did not compose them in chronological order, however. Listing them by date of setting, followed by the years they first appeared in New York, they are Gem of the Ocean (set in 1904/staged in New York in 2004), Joe Turner’s Come and Gone (1911/1988), Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (1927/1984), The Piano Lesson (1936/1990), Seven Guitars (1948/1996), Fences (1957-1958, 1963/1987), Two Trains Running (1969/1992), Jitney (1977/2000), King Hedley II (1985/2001), and Radio Golf (1997/2007). Of them, Fences is generally said to be his most popular. Fences and The Piano Lesson earned Pulitzer Prizes, as well. Biographer Patti Hartigan, however, has called Joe Turner his "masterpiece" (Hartigan 14, 422) and Wilson said it was his favorite play.

Although nearly all these works were set in Pittsburgh, by his own admission, Wilson had a "love-hate" relationship with the city, and this surfaced in his writing (quoted in Glasco and Rawson 17). He had "stumbled" through its streets "with the weight of the buildings pressing in on me and my spirit pushed into terrifying contractions." Yet it was also the place where he discovered, within the people he observed and the stories he encountered on the Hill, a "resiliency of the human spirit" and "the gift of hope refreshened" (quoted in Glasco and Rawson 6). Explaining Wilson’s whole cycle, Christopher Rawson noted "two great, wrenching diasporas": "the fearsome middle passage of the slave ships" and "successive post-Civil War of black migration from the agrarian South to the industrial North." 

In many of the plays, the concept of an individual’s "song"—a metaphor for their "personal spiritual relationship to that shared past"—is an important theme, and when an individual is alienated from the past, historical pain is brought forward into the present. If characters find their songs, however, their outlooks are more hopeful (Glasco and Rawson 121). By making everyday people the focus of his art, Wilson’s plays endeavored to reclaim and sustain the gifts that African American history, music, spirituality, and social mores offer, thus helping individuals and communities heal. As Wilson explained to Ed Bradley in a 2002 interview for 60 Minutes:

If that connection to your grandparents is broken, then you are lost in the world. You don't know who you are, you don't know what your duty is. Without that tradition, without something in place that says this is how you conduct yourself in the world, then we're just wandering all over the place without any purpose and without any future and without any direction.

Wilson’s work richly demonstrated the harms that racism caused, encouraging the audience to think about inequities of the present day. Yet, at the same time, he highlighted African American historical experiences and cultural differences as a source of pride, not shame. Furthermore, he presented African American culture as a crucial element in achieving wholeness and wellness. In this effort, he was especially moved by the works of Romare Bearden, whose paintings Mill Hand’s Lunch Bucket (1978) and The Piano Lesson (1983) directly inspired Joe Turner and The Piano Lesson. Wilson said of Bearden, "What I saw was black life presented on its own terms, on a grand and epic scale, with all its richness and fullness, in a language that was vibrant and which, made attendant to everyday life, ennobled it, affirmed its value, and exalted its presence" (Herrington 58). While Wilson’s work was not political in the same way as some of his contemporaries’ was, it could have profound social impact. 

Wilson also used his reputation to highlight and redress the marginalization of African Americans within the theater. A keynote speech he delivered in June 1996 before a conference of the Theater Communications Group, "The Ground on Which I Stand," sparked important dialogs about race, racism, and theater. It continues to resonate for those who are concerned about how to create a theater profession that is more inclusive. By continuing to craft plays with numerous, varied African American characters, writing stirring monologues for them, and insisting that Black talent fill on-stage and behind-the-scenes roles, he provided significant career opportunities for both emerging and established actors, including Angela Bassett, Viola Davis, Charles Dutton, Laurence Fishburne, S. Epatha Merkerson, Felicia Rashad, Brian Stokes Mitchell, and Courtney B. Vance. 

As Wilson’s career progressed, he received broader public attention. He became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1991) and the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1995). He also earned a National Humanities Medal (1999). Still, Wilson retained strong ties to Pittsburgh. In 1990, for example, Pittsburgh Magazine named him Pittsburgher of the Year. After his death of liver cancer in 2005, he was interred in the city which had inspired so much of his work. Luminaries from around the country converged at Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Hall, and, following the funeral service, his procession passed locations that were named in his plays before reaching his final resting place at Greenwood Cemetery. 

Since Wilson’s passing, his work continues to be relevant. The former Virginia Theater on W. 52nd St. in New York was renamed the August Wilson Theatre shortly after his death. Denzel Washington, who won a Tony Award for his stage portrayal of Troy Maxson in Fences, committed to producing the entire ten-play cycle on film; at the time of this writing, Fences (2016), Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (2020), and The Piano Lesson (2024) have been released. Wilson’s former home at 1727 Bedford Avenue in Pittsburgh, renamed the August Wilson House, has been a site of community and literary events, and the August Wilson African American Cultural Center on Liberty Avenue has sought to promote Black life in ways Wilson envisioned. Wilson has been the subject of documentaries, a special issue of a scholarly journal (College Literature, vol. 36, no. 2, Spring 2009), a story map by the Pennsylvania Center for the Book, and numerous other studies. He has appeared on a U.S. postage stamp, he is recognized with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and his papers are preserved for posterity by the University of Pittsburgh. 

Wilson was survived by various relatives—including his siblings, nephews, and nieces; his first wife, Brenda Burton, whom he married in 1969 and divorced in 1972; their daughter Sakina Ansari Wilson, born in 1970; his second wife, Judy Oliver, a social worker, whom he wed in 1981 and divorced in 1990; his third wife, costume designer Constanza Romero, whom he married in 1994; and his second child, Azula Carmen Wilson, born in 1997. Some of these relations, especially his sisters Linda Jean Kittel and Freda Ellis, continued to further his legacy. As Patti Hartigan sums up in her biography of him, "He was neither a seer nor a prophet; he was a truth-teller, a griot who accurately depicted the ordinary lives of honorable people whose stories were ignored by the mainstream culture" (422). Wilson’s Pittsburgh plays will be dramatic beacons for many years to come.