Celebrating the birth & legacy of

AUGUST WILSON

“I remain fascinated by the idea of an audience as a community of people who gather willingly to bear witness. A novelist writes a novel and people read it. But reading is a solitary act. While it may elicit a varied and personal response, the communal nature of the audience is like having five hundred people read your novel and respond to it at the same time. I find that thrilling.”

— August Wilson

A two-time recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, playwright August Wilson chronicled the African-American experience in the 20th century in a series of plays that stand as a landmark in the history of black culture, of American literature and of Broadway theater.   He has been called Theater’s Poet of Black America.

He was born Frederick August Kittel on April 27, 1945, in the Hill District community of Pittsburgh, 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 siblings in a two-room, cold-water flat. Though bright and creative, he found student life difficult. Racially bullied at one school, bored at the next and accused of cheating at another, he secretly dropped out of high school in his early teens.  For the next several years, Wilson educated himself at the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh during school hours, unbeknownst to his mother. 

A voracious reader from a young age, Wilson began his artistic life as a poet. He also sought out the poetry of everyday life. He spent time in restaurants, barbershops and on the streets of “The Hill,” listening to the residents’ voices and stories. Wilson would later draw on these voices and histories to create unforgettable characters in his plays.

“I don’t write particularly to effect social change. I believe writing can do that, but that’s not why I write. I work as an artist. All art is political in the sense that it serves someone’s politics. Here in America whites have a particular view of blacks. I think my plays offer them a different way to look at black Americans. In ‘Fences’ …. white people find out that the content of this black garbage man’s life is affected by the same things—love, honor, beauty, betrayal, duty. Recognizing that these things are as much part of his life as theirs can affect how they think about and deal with black people in their lives.”

— August Wilson

In 1978, he moved to St. Paul, Minnesota where he wrote his first notable play, Jitney (1979) for which he earned a fellowship at the Minneapolis Playwright Center.  His next play, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (1982), was accepted at the Eugene O'Neill Playwright's Conference.  Over the next two decades, Mr. Wilson would write a total of ten plays collectively called The Pittsburgh Cycle, chronicling the experiences and heritage of the African-American community in the 20th century.

All of his plays have received Tony Award nominations for best play (Fences is the only one to win, with Jitney receiving the Tony Award for Best Revival) and Wilson also received seven New York Drama Critics Circle Awards and two Drama Desk Awards for his work.

In addition, the August Wilson Monologue Competition, founded in 2007, is a National educational program for students 9-12 that celebrates and preserves Wilson’s Legacy.

On October 2, 2005, August Wilson died of liver cancer.  Fourteen days later, the former Virginia Theater on Broadway was renamed the August Wilson Theatre.

“In dialogue that married the complexity of jazz to the emotional power of the blues, he argued eloquently for the importance of Black Americans' honoring the pain and passion in their history, not burying it to smooth the road to assimilation. For Mr. Wilson, it was imperative for Black Americans to draw upon the moral and spiritual nobility of their ancestors' struggles to inspire their own ongoing fight against the legacies of white racism.”

— The New York Times

Portions of this biography were excerpted from The New York Times, American Masters and Biography.com.

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