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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 African-American community in the 20th century.
Sep 28, 2024 · They write new content and verify and edit content received from contributors. August Wilson (born April 27, 1945, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, U.S.—died October 2, 2005, Seattle, Washington) was a playwright who penned an acclaimed cycle of plays, each set in a different decade of the 20th century, about Black American life.
- 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...
Apr 8, 2001 · Wilson found another father figure in Chawley Williams, a black drug dealer turned poet, who became his protector on the street. “August wasn’t really black. He was half-and-half,” Williams ...
The Piano Lesson is a 1987 play by American playwright August Wilson. It is the fourth play in Wilson's The Pittsburgh Cycle. Wilson began writing this play by playing with the various answers regarding the possibility of "acquir [ing] a sense of self-worth by denying one's past". [1] The Piano Lesson received the 1990 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
August Wilson was an American playwright best known for his extraordinary cycle of 10 plays that chronicle the 20th century African-American experience. All but one of Wilson’s masterful plays are set in the Hill District, the working-class neighborhood of his birth in 1945. Each play is set in a different decade and collectively became known ...
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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 ...
