August Wilson
August Wilson was born Frederick August Kittel on April 27, 1945, to Daisy Wilson and Frederick Kittel, a white baker who had emigrated from Germany to Pittsburgh. The fourth of Daisy Wilson’s six children, he changed his name to August Wilson after his father’s death in 1965. The family lived in “the Hill,” the Pittsburgh neighborhood that later provided the setting for most of his plays. Wilson quit school as a teenager, after a teacher wrongfully accused him of plagiarism, and educated himself in Pittsburgh’s libraries, where he read such esteemed writers as Richard Wright, Langston Hughes and Ralph Ellison.
Wilson began his writing career as a poet, influenced largely by the writings of political poet and playwright Amiri Baraka. His political interests led him to become involved in theater in the late 1960s as a co-founder of Black Horizons, a Pittsburgh community theater. In 1978, he moved to Minnesota and soon received a fellowship from the Minneapolis Playwrights Center. In 1981, St. Paul’s Penumbra Theatre staged his first play, Black Bart and the Sacred Hills, a satirical western adapted from an earlier series of poems. In 1982, after several unsuccessful submissions, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom was accepted for a workshop by the National Playwrights Conference of the O’Neill Theatre Center in Connecticut, inaugurating Wilson’s association with director Lloyd Richards, the head of the Playwrights Conference. Richards would direct the first five plays Wilson wrote as he developed his 10-play cycle chronicling the experiences of African Americans throughout the 20th century. The winner of Rockefeller and Guggenheim fellowships, a Drama Desk Award, two Pulitzer Prizes and four New York Drama Critics’ Circle Awards, Wilson would become one of the late 20th century’s most acclaimed playwrights over the next two decades.
In August 2005, Wilson shocked the theater world when he announced that he had inoperable liver cancer. The playwright died on October 2, 2005, a little more than six months after Radio Golf, the last play in the cycle to be written and produced, was premiered.