August Wilson

August Wilson, born Frederick August Kittel Jr. on April 27, 1945, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, was an American playwright often described as “theater’s poet of Black America.” He died on October 2, 2005. Wilson became best known for a group of 10 plays called the Pittsburgh Cycle, or the Century Cycle, which chronicles the experiences and heritage of the African-American community across the 20th century.

The cycle includes Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (1984), Fences (1987), Joe Turner’s Come and Gone (1988), and The Piano Lesson (1990). Fences and The Piano Lesson each won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. In 2006, the year after his death, Wilson was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame. Three of his plays were later adapted or re-adapted into films: Fences in 2016, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom in 2020, and The Piano Lesson in 2024, with Denzel Washington shepherding the films and vowing to adapt the rest for a wider audience.

Wilson’s beginnings were rooted in Pittsburgh’s Hill District, a neighborhood that would become the setting for many of his plays. He was the fourth of six children. His father, Frederick August Kittel Sr., was a Sudeten German immigrant and a baker-pastry cook; his mother, Daisy Wilson, was an African-American woman from North Carolina who cleaned homes. His father was mostly absent, and his mother raised the children alone for a time in a two-room apartment behind a grocery store. Wilson later took his mother’s surname after his father’s death in 1965.

His childhood gave him a close view of hardship, race, family, and belonging. The Hill District was economically depressed and inhabited mainly by Black Americans and Jewish and Italian immigrants. As a biracial child, Wilson struggled to feel fully at home in either African-American culture or White culture until later in life. After his mother remarried and the family moved to the predominantly White working-class neighborhood of Hazelwood, they met racial hostility; bricks were thrown through a window at their new home, and they were forced to move again. His experiences with a strong matriarch shaped the way his plays would be written.

Wilson left school young, but he educated himself intensely. After dropping out of Gladstone High School in the 10th grade, he worked menial jobs and met a wide range of people who later fed his characters. He used the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh so extensively that it later awarded him an honorary high school diploma. He had learned to read at four, began reading Black writers at 12, and spent his teen years with the work of Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, Arna Bontemps, and others. In the 1960s he wrote poems in bars, a cigar store, and cafes, catching voices on napkins and yellow notepads.

Wilson’s art was shaped by the blues of Bessie Smith, the voice of Malcolm X, and the Black Power movement’s ideas of self-sufficiency, self-defense, and self-determination. In 1968, with Rob Penny, he co-founded the Black Horizon Theater in the Hill District. His early plays were performed in small theaters, schools, and public housing community centers. The themes that ran through his work included systemic and historical exploitation of African Americans, race relations, identity, migration, and racial discrimination. His words still carry because they hold humor, vulnerability, tragedy, trauma, and full human presence on the stage.