August Wilson

Frederick August Kittel Jr. was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on the twenty-seventh of April 1945. He left school at fifteen after being falsely accused of plagiarism by a teacher who could not believe he had written the assignment. He educated himself in the public library, took the name August Wilson (after his mother), and entered the Black Arts Movement in Pittsburgh in the late 1960s.

He produced, between 1982 and 2005, the ten-play Pittsburgh Cycle — one play set in each decade of the twentieth century, all but one (Ma Rainey's Black Bottom) set in the predominantly Black Hill District of Pittsburgh. The Cycle, taken whole, is among the most ambitious dramatic projects in American theater. Two of the plays — Fences (1987) and The Piano Lesson (1990) — received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The Cycle has been continuously produced in regional theater across the United States and is now studied as the principal dramatic record of twentieth-century Black urban American life.

He completed the final play, Radio Golf (set in the 1990s), in the months before his death from liver cancer. The play opened at the Yale Repertory Theatre in April 2005. He died in Seattle on the second of October 2005, age sixty.

The Virginia Theatre on Broadway was renamed the August Wilson Theatre two weeks after his death — the first Broadway house ever named for an African American.

He is honored here as the playwright whose ten plays form the principal record of the twentieth century in Black American drama.