August Wilson
August Wilson was an American playwright. He has been referred to as the "theater's poet of Black America". He is best known for a series of 10 plays, collectively called The Pittsburgh Cycle '', which chronicle the experiences and heritage of the African-American community in the 20th century. Plays in the series include Fences and The Piano Lesson, each of which won Wilson the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, as well as Ma Rainey's Black Bottom and Joe Turner's Come and Gone. In 2006, Wilson was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame.
Other themes range from the systemic and historical exploitation of African Americans, race relations, identity, migration, and racial discrimination. Viola Davis said that Wilson's writing "captures our humor, our vulnerabilities, our tragedies, our trauma. And he humanizes us. And he allows us to talk." Since Wilson's death, three of his plays have been adapted or re-adapted into films: Fences, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom and The Piano Lesson''. Denzel Washington has shepherded the films and has vowed to continue Wilson's legacy by adapting the rest of his plays into films for a wider audience. Washington said, "the greatest part of what's left of my career is making sure that August is taken care of".
Early life
Wilson was born Frederick August Kittel Jr. in the Hill District of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the fourth of six children. His father, Frederick August Kittel Sr., was a Sudeten German immigrant, who was a baker/pastry cook. His mother, Daisy Wilson, was an African-American woman from North Carolina who cleaned homes for a living. Wilson's anecdotal history reports that his maternal grandmother walked from North Carolina to Pennsylvania in search of a better life. Wilson's mother raised the children alone until he was five in a two-room apartment behind a grocery store at 1727 Bedford Avenue; his father was mostly absent from his childhood. Wilson later wrote under his mother's surname.The economically depressed neighborhood where he was raised was inhabited predominantly by Black Americans and Jewish and Italian immigrants. Life was tough for the Kittel siblings as they were biracial. August struggled with finding a sense of belonging to a particular culture and did not feel that he truly fit into African-American culture or White culture until later in life. Wilson's mother divorced his father and married David Bedford in the 1950s, and the family moved from the Hill District to the then predominantly White working-class neighborhood of Hazelwood, where they encountered racial hostility; bricks were thrown through a window at their new home. They were soon forced out of their house and on to their next home.
The Hill District went on to become the setting of numerous plays in the Pittsburgh Cycle. His experiences growing up there with a strong matriarch shaped the way his plays would be written.
In 1959, Wilson was one of 14 African-American students at Central Catholic High School but dropped out after one year. He then attended Connelley Vocational High School, but found the curriculum unchallenging. He dropped out of Gladstone High School in the 10th grade in 1960 after his teacher accused him of plagiarizing a 20-page paper he wrote on Napoleon I of France. Wilson hid his decision from his mother because he did not want to disappoint her. At the age of 16 he began working menial jobs, where he met a wide variety of people on whom some of his later characters were based, such as Sam in The Janitor.
Wilson's extensive use of the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh resulted in its later awarding him an honorary high school diploma. Wilson, who said he had learned to read at the age of four, began reading Black writers at the library when he was 12 and spent the remainder of his teen years educating himself through the books of Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, Arna Bontemps, and others.
Career
1960s
Wilson knew that he wanted to be a writer, but this created tension with his mother, who wanted him to become a lawyer. She forced him to leave the family home and he enlisted in the United States Army for a three-year stint in 1962, but he was discharged after a year and went back to working various odd jobs as a porter, short-order cook, gardener, and dishwasher.Frederick August Kittel Jr. changed his name to August Wilson to honor his mother after his father's death in 1965. That same year, he discovered the blues as sung by Bessie Smith, and he bought a stolen typewriter for $10, which he often pawned when money was tight. At 20, he decided he was a poet and submitted work to such magazines as Harper's. He began to write in bars, the local cigar store, and cafes—longhand on table napkins and on yellow notepads, absorbing the voices and characters around him. He liked to write on cafe napkins because, he said, it freed him up and made him less self-conscious as a writer. He would then gather the notes and type them up at home. Gifted with a talent for catching dialect and accents, Wilson had an "astonishing memory", which he put to full use during his career. He slowly learned not to censor the language he heard when incorporating it into his work.
Malcolm X's voice influenced Wilson's life and work. Both the Nation of Islam and the Black Power movement spoke to him regarding self-sufficiency, self-defense, and self-determination, and he appreciated the origin myths that Elijah Muhammad supported. In 1969 Wilson married Brenda Burton, a Muslim, and became associated with the NOI, though he reportedly did not convert. He and Brenda had one daughter, Sakina Ansari-Wilson. The couple divorced in 1972.
In 1968, along with his friend Rob Penny, Wilson co-founded the Black Horizon Theater in the Hill District of Pittsburgh. Wilson's first play, Recycling, was performed for audiences in small theaters, schools and public housing community centers for 50 cents a ticket. Among these early efforts was Jitney, which he revised more than two decades later as part of his 10-play cycle on 20th-century Pittsburgh. He had no directing experience. He recalled: "Someone had looked around and said, 'Who's going to be the director?' I said, 'I will.' I said that because I knew my way around the library. So I went to look for a book on how to direct a play. I found one called The Fundamentals of Play Directing and checked it out."
1970s
In 1976, Vernell Lillie, who had founded the Kuntu Repertory Theatre at the University of Pittsburgh two years earlier, directed Wilson's The Homecoming. That same year Wilson saw Athol Fugard's Sizwe Banzi is Dead, staged at the Pittsburgh Public Theater, the first time he attended professionally produced drama. Wilson, Penny, and poet Maisha Baton then founded the Kuntu Writers Workshop to bring African-American writers together and to assist them in publication and production. Both organizations remain active.In 1978, Wilson moved to Saint Paul, Minnesota, at the suggestion of his friend, director Claude Purdy, who helped him secure a job writing educational scripts for the Science Museum of Minnesota. In 1980 he received a fellowship for The Playwrights' Center in Minneapolis. He quit the museum in 1981, but continued writing plays. For three years, he was a part-time cook for the Little Brothers of the Poor. Wilson had a long association with the Penumbra Theatre Company of St. Paul, which was initially funded by a federal Comprehensive Employment and Training Act grant and which premiered some of his plays. He wrote Fullerton Street, which has been unproduced and unpublished, in 1980. It follows the Joe Louis vs. Billy Conn fight in 1941 and the loss of values attendant on the Great Migration to the urban North.
1980s
Throughout the 1980s, Wilson wrote the majority of his work including Jitney, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, Fences, Joe Turner's Come and Gone, and The Piano Lesson.In 1987, St. Paul's mayor George Latimer named May 27 "August Wilson Day". He was honored because he is the only person from Minnesota to win a Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
1990s
In 1990, Wilson left St. Paul after getting divorced and moved to Seattle. There he developed a relationship with Seattle Repertory Theatre, which produced his entire 10-play cycle and his one-man show How I Learned What I Learned.Though he was a writer dedicated to writing for theater, a Hollywood studio proposed filming Wilson's play Fences. He insisted that a Black director be hired for the film, saying: "I declined a White director not on the basis of race but on the basis of culture. White directors are not qualified for the job. The job requires someone who shares the specifics of the culture of Black Americans." The film remained unmade until 2016, when Denzel Washington directed the film Fences, starring Washington and Viola Davis. It earned Wilson a posthumous Oscar nomination.
Wilson received many honorary degrees, including an honorary Doctor of Humanities from the University of Pittsburgh, of which he was a trustee from 1992 until 1995.
Wilson maintained a strong voice in the progress and development of the contemporary Black theater, undoubtedly taking influences from the examples of his youth, such as those displayed during the Black Arts Movement. One of the most notable examples of Wilson's strong opinions and critiques of what was Black theater's state in the 1990s, was the "On Cultural Power: The August Wilson/Robert Brustein Discussion" where Wilson argued for a completely Black theater with all positions filled by Blacks. Conversely, he argued that Black actors should not play roles not specifically Black. Brustein heatedly took an opposing view.