“For me, the original play becomes an historical document: This is where I was when I wrote it, and I have to move on now to something else.” -August Wilson
Two time Pulitzer Prize winning playwright, August Wilson was born Frederick August Kittel April 27, 1945 in the Hill District of Pittsburgh. In1965 when his father passed away, August changed his name to honor his mother, Daisy Wilson.
Born to a German Immigrant father of the same name and an African American housekeeper, Wilson began his life in a working class African American community. When his mother remarried, the family moved to a predominantly white middle class area of Pittsburgh called Hazelton. Wilson never forgot his roots in the Hill District and has set his plays against this backdrop.
Never completing high school, he dropped out at the age of sixteen to educate himself, Wilson worked menial jobs while submitting poetry to a publication at the University of Pittsburgh. In spite of his little experience, Wilson became heavily involved in the Black Horizons on the Hill Theatre Company. He considered himself to be “a cultural nationalist . . . trying to raise consciousness through theater.”
It wasn’t until Wilson moved to St. Paul, Minnesota that he began to be inspired by the black culture of Pittsburgh, it is here that he wrote his first play, Jitney, and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom which lead him to be introduced to and begin collaboration with Lloyd Richards of the Yale Repertory Theatre where Ma was first presented. Richards would work as a collaborator in assisting Wilson to rewrite and refine many of his works.
Fences falls fifth in his ten play cycle, each of which takes place in a different decade of the twentieth century in the Hill District of Pittsburgh in which Wilson grew up. Each play covers the lives, dreams, triumphs and tragedies of African American history and culture. Fences, for which he won his first Pulitzer prize opened on Broadway in 1987.
Not long after completing his ten play cycle, August Wilson was diagnosed with liver cancer in early 2005 and passed away October 2, 2005.
Later that year, two weeks after Wilson's death, the the Jujamcyn Theatre group in New York announced the Virginia Theatre on 52nd Street was renamed for Wilson. He was the first African-American to be given this honor on Broadway.
Gem of the Ocean, 1904
Joe Turner's Come and Gone, 1911
Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, 1927
The Piano Lesson, 1936
Seven Guitars, 1948
Fences, 1957-58 and 1963
Two Trains Running, 1969
Jitney, 1977
King Hedley, II, 1985
Radio Golf, 1997
