August Wilson (April 27, 1945 – October 2, 2005) was an American playwright whose work included a series of ten plays, The Pittsburgh Cycle, for which he received two Pulitzer Prizes for Drama. Each work in the series is set in a different decade, and depicts comic and tragic aspects of the African-American experience in the 20th century.
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 who never lived with his family. His mother, Daisy Wilson, was an African-American cleaning woman, from North Carolina. Wilson’s 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 above 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. 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.
In 1959, Wilson was one of fourteen African-American students at the Central Catholic High School, from which he 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 (1985).
Wilson made such extensive use of the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh to educate himself that it later awarded him an honorary high school diploma, the only diploma it has ever bestowed. Wilson, who had learned to read at the age of 4, 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.
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 left after one 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 (such as The Ground on Which I Stand, 1996). Both the Nation of Islam and the Black Power 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 converted to Islam to sustain the marriage. He and Brenda had one daughter, Sakina Ansari-Wilson, and divorced in 1972.
In 1968, he co-founded the Black Horizon Theater in the Hill District of Pittsburgh along with his friend Rob Penny. 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.”
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 Sizwe Banzi is Dead at the Pittsburgh Public Theater, his first professional play. Wilson, Penny, and poet Maisha Baton also started the Kuntu Writers Workshop to bring African-American writers together and to assist them in publication and production. Both organizations are still active.
He then became involved in the civil rights movement, describing himself as a Black Nationalist. He moved to Minneapolis and began to write, clearly using speech patterns and rhythms that were familiar to him from Black neighborhoods of Pittsburgh. His writing was also strongly influenced by the blues and artist Romare Bearden. In 1968 he founded and directed the Black Horizon Theater Company in Pittsburgh in a predominantly Black neighborhood referred to as “the Hill”. In 1972 he began writing a play, Jitney, about a Gypsy cab station, which was produced in 1978 at Black Horizon and in 1982 at the Eugene O’Neill Center’s National Playwright Conference.
Wilson also founded the Playwrights Center in Minneapolis. Shortly after, he wrote Fullerton Street, which was not as well received as Jitney. His first commercial success was Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, which was developed at the Playwrights Center in 1983, Yale Repertory Theater in 1984 and Broadway where it enjoyed 275 performances and won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. The play was set in a movie studio and Charles Dutton played the character of Levee.
Wilson’s next play was Fences. It presented a slice-of-life in a Black tenement in (Pittsburgh?) set in the late 1950s through 1965. Joe Turner’s Come and Gone opened at the Yale Repertory Theater in late 1986 and moved to New York in early 1988. It won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. Two Trains Running opened in 1992 and starred Laurence Fishburne and Cynthia Martells. Seven Guitars opened at the Goodman Theater, Chicago in 1995. The play has since moved to Broadway with a successful run. Set in Pittsburgh, it’s about the blues and how they mean different things to Blacks and to Whites.
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 premiered some of his plays. He wrote Fullerton Street, which has been unproduced and unpublished, in 1980. It follows the Joe Louis/Billy Conn fight in 1940 and the loss of values attendant on the Great Migration to the urban North.
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.
In 1990 Wilson left St. Paul after getting divorced and moved to Seattle. There he developed a relationship with Seattle Repertory Theatre, which became the only theater in the country to produce 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, It starred 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, where he served as a member of the University’s Board of Trustees from 1992 until 1995.
Wilson maintained a strong voice in the progress and development of the (then) 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 ’90s, was the “On Cultural Power: The August Wilson/Robert Brustein Discussion”—being just one of the times where Wilson spoke plainly for the progression of black theater. Here, Wilson engages in a somewhat heated discussion with Robert Brustein. Neither truly came out ‘right’; however, both helped in calling attention to the issue and shedding light on the poor state the form was in. Undeniably, Wilson left an everlasting imprint on Black Theater’s development.
Wilson’s drama, King Hedley II opened at the Virginia Theater on Broadway in April 2001, and it starred Brian Stokes-Mitchell and Leslie Uggams. Currently Wilson ended his 10-work cycle of plays at the theater where his first debuted more than 20 years ago. “Radio Golf” premiered at the Yale Repertory Theater, Timothy Douglas directing the staging through May 14, 2005.
Wilson was married three times. His first marriage was to Brenda Burton from 1969 to 1972. They had one daughter, Sakina Ansari, born 1970. In 1981 he married Judy Oliver, a social worker; they divorced in 1990. He married again in 1994 and was survived by his third wife, costume designer, Constanza Romero, whom he met on the set of The Piano Lesson. They had a daughter, Azula Carmen Wilson. Wilson was also survived by siblings Freda Ellis, Linda Jean Kittel, Donna Conley, Barbara Jean Wilson, Edwin Kittel and Richard Kittel.
Wilson reported that he had been diagnosed with liver cancer in June 2005 and been given three to five months to live. He died on October 2, 2005, at Swedish Medical Center in Seattle, and was interred at Greenwood Cemetery, Pittsburgh, on October 8, 2005, aged 60.
Written by Dianne Washington