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August Wilson (né Frederick August Kittel Jr.; April 27, 1945 – October 2, 2005) was an American playwright. He has been referred to as the "theater's poet of Black America". [1] He is best known for a series of 10 plays, collectively called The Pittsburgh Cycle (or The Century Cycle), which chronicle the experiences and heritage of the ...
May 16, 2017 · August Wilson, 60, whose plays about 20th-century black life were among the most celebrated of modern dramas, died yesterday at Swedish Medical Center in Seattle, his city of residence.
Our series Full Bio returns, and this month we are focusing on the life of pioneering playwright August Wilson, who won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama twice, and whose plays focus on the life of...
Sep 28, 2024 · Quick Facts. Original name: Frederick August Kittel. Born: April 27, 1945, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, U.S. Died: October 2, 2005, Seattle, Washington (aged 60) Awards And Honors: Pulitzer Prize. Notable Works: “Fences” “Gem of the Ocean” “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone” “King Hedley II” “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” “Radio Golf” “Seven Guitars”
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
- August Wilson’s Childhood
- August Wilson’s Artistic Development
- August Wilson’s Century Play Cycle
- August Wilson’s Legacy
- August Wilson Timeline
Wilson’s rise from humble beginnings to Broadway was unlikely. Born Frederick August Kittel on April 27, 1945, in the Hill District community of Pittsburgh, he was the son of Daisy Wilson, an African-American cleaning woman, and Frederick Kittel, a German immigrant and baker who was mostly absent from Wilson’s life. His mother raised Wilson and his...
Wilson had begun writing plays — one a musical western — before relocating to Minneapolis. There he was given a fellowship to the Minnesota Playwrights Center, which led to his acceptance into the National Playwrights Conference at the O’Neill Theater Center in Connecticut. During the conference — an intense collaboration of artists testing new wor...
Wilson’s greatest contribution to American culture would be his defining 10-play cycle, one for each decade of the past century. All but one — Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom— set in the city of Pittsburgh: 1900: Gem of the Ocean (2002) 1910: Joe Turner’s Come and Gone (1986) 1920: Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (1984) 1930: The Piano Lesson (1989) 1940: Seven ...
In the late 90s, with a career spanning nearly two decades, Wilson married his third wife, costume designer Constanza Romero. The two had a daughter and moved to Seattle, WA, where Wilson continued to work on the last plays in the cycle. In June 2005, Wilson was diagnosed with terminal liver cancer. He died Sunday, October 2, 2005, in a Seattle hos...
April 27, 1945– Frederick August Kittel is born in Pittsburgh, PA, in the city neighborhood known as “The Hill.” The Hill is Pittsburgh’s Harlem, a hub of creativity and commerce, and in 1945, still racially mixed. His mother, Daisy Wilson, was African-American, while his father, a German immigrant named Frederick Kittel, was white. He is one of se...
Jan 11, 2017 · During two improbably fertile decades, starting in the 1980s, August Wilson (1945-2005) wrote a cycle of 10 generation-spanning plays portraying African-American lives in the Hill District of...
Yet it’s her role as widow and executor of the estate of Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright August Wilson, whose work chronicled Black life in the 20 th century, that is the focus of her considerable energy right now.
