August Wilson was born Frederick August Kittel in 1945 in Pittsburgh’s Hill District, where he lived for 33 years. Wilson was the fourth of six children of a white German father and African-American mother. He began his writing career as a poet in the 1960s and 70s, while also involved in the civil rights movement and working odd jobs. In 1965 he bought his first typewriter with $20 his sister paid him to write a college term paper. Hoping to use theater to raise African-American cultural consciousness, he co-founded Black Horizons, a community theater in Pittsburgh, with Rob Penny in 1968. After producing and directing African-American plays at Black Horizons, Wilson began writing his own plays in the early 70s. In 1976, the Kuntu Theater staged his play The Homecoming, and in 1981 his first professionally produced play, a satirical Western called Black Bart and the Sacred Hills, was staged at the Penumbra Theater. Wilson’s breakthrough came in 1982, when the National Playwrights Conference at the O’Neill Theater Center accepted Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom for a workshop. The play opened on Broadway in 1984, and in 1985 it earned Wilson his first New York Drama Critics Circle Award. Even as Ma Rainey was enjoying its success, Wilson was planning further installments in what would become a ten-play cycle exploring the African-American experience in the 20th century, with a play for each decade. Fences, Wilson’s second play to move to Broadway, won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and also set a new Broadway record for the highest-grossing non-musical, bringing in $11 million in its first year, 1987. Seven more plays have since followed, joining Ma Rainey, Fences and Jitney, which was written in 1979 but later revised. Radio Golf, which completes the cycle as the 1990s play, premiered at Yale Repertory Theatre in April 2005, and finished a run at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles on September 18. It will be moving to Broadway in the 2006-07 season. With the completion of his extraordinarily ambitious ten-play cycle, Wilson has secured his place as one of the most important American playwrights of his generation. Broadway’s Virginia Theater will be renamed for him on October 17, marking the first time a Broadway theater has been named for an African-American. In August of 2005, he announced that he has been diagnosed with terminal liver cancer. “It’s not like poker, you can’t throw your hand in,” Wilson told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. “I’ve lived a blessed life. I’m ready.” August Wilson died October 2, 2005. |
