August Wilson

Frederick August Kittel Jr. was born on the twenty-seventh of April 1945 in the Hill District of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania — then a vibrant, racially mixed hub of Black creativity and commerce that would become the wellspring of his life's work. The son of a German immigrant father and an African American mother, Daisy Wilson, he later took his mother's name in tribute to her.

At fifteen he was accused of plagiarism by a teacher who could not accept that he had written a searching paper on Napoleon Bonaparte. Rather than accept the insult, he left Gladstone High School — and, unknown to his mother, educated himself in the stacks of Pittsburgh's Carnegie Library, reading his way into a mastery no classroom had offered him. That self-schooling forged the ear and the discipline that would define him.

Wilson devoted his art to the American Century Cycle, known as the Pittsburgh Cycle: ten plays, one for each decade of the twentieth century, chronicling the inner lives, griefs, and dignity of Black America. Among them stand Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, Fences, Joe Turner's Come and Gone, and The Piano Lesson. For Fences (1987) and The Piano Lesson (1990) he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

He died of liver cancer in Seattle, Washington, on the second of October 2005, at the age of sixty. Two weeks later, Broadway's Virginia Theatre was renamed in his honor — the first Broadway house to bear the name of a Black American. He gave the twentieth century a voice it had been denied, and that voice endures on the stage he made his own.