August Wilson

Wilson, August - 1945–, American playwright and poet, b. Pittsburgh as Frederick August Kittel. Largely self-educated, Wilson first attracted wide critical attention with his Broadway debut, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (1984), a play set in 1927 that dramatizes the conflicts between the blues diva and a member of her band and the larger conflicts brought about by racist American society. Wilson's plays center on the struggles and identity of African Americans and the deleterious effect of white American institutions such as religion and law on black American life. They draw heavily on his own experience growing up in the Hill district of Pittsburgh, a black ghetto where most of his plays are set. His characters are ordinary people whose histories, frustrations, and aspirations Wilson astutely portrays. Jitney (1982), Fences (1987; Pulitzer Prize), Joe Turner's Come and Gone (1988), The Piano Lesson (1990; Pulitzer Prize), Two Trains Running (1992), Seven Guitars (1995), King Hedley II (2001), and Gem of the Ocean (2003) form a series of dramas that focuses on the major issues confronting African Americans during different decades of the 20th cent. In 2003, Wilson starred in a production of his autobiographical one-man play How I Learned What I Learned.

See studies by M. Elkins, ed. (1994), A. Nadel, ed. (1994), K. Pereira (1995), S. G. Shannon (1995), J. Herrington (1998), Y. Shafer (1998), M. L. Bogumil (1999), Q. Wang (1999), P. Wolfe (1999), H. Bloom, ed. (2002).

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