August Wilson Biography Quotes 9 Report mistakes

Early Life and Self-Education
August Wilson was born Frederick August Kittel on April 27, 1945, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and grew up in the city's Hill District, a historically Black neighborhood whose voices and memories would become the bedrock of his art. His mother, Daisy Wilson, was a domestic worker who held the family together with resolve and practical wisdom. His father, Frederick August Kittel, a German immigrant, was often absent. The racial dynamics of mid-century Pittsburgh shaped his formative years: Wilson moved among schools, encountered hostility and low expectations, and, at age fifteen, left high school after a teacher accused him of plagiarizing a paper that exceeded what they believed a Black student could write. He continued his education on his own, spending long days at the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, devouring history, philosophy, and literature, and building the private curriculum that would become the backbone of a unique literary voice.

From Poetry to the Stage
Wilson first found himself as a poet. In the 1960s and early 1970s he read widely, wrote daily, and absorbed the energy of the Black Arts Movement. He listened to the blues and to the talk of the Hill District, registering rhythms of speech, idiom, and myth. He considered language a living music, and the blues became both an aesthetic resource and a philosophy: an art of naming pain and possibility. Seeking a place for that music, he co-founded the Black Horizons Theater in 1968 with the poet and dramatist Rob Penny. The company created space for Black artists to write, direct, and perform their own stories in Pittsburgh, and its community ethos helped clarify his sense that a playwright's first responsibility is to the culture that births the work.

Leaving Pittsburgh, Finding a Dramatic Vision
In the late 1970s Wilson's circle widened through collaborators who recognized his emerging gifts. The director and friend Claude Purdy encouraged him to try his hand at playwriting and to leave Pittsburgh to test his work on new stages. In 1978 Wilson moved to St. Paul, Minnesota, where he took a job writing scripts for educational exhibits at the Science Museum of Minnesota and continued drafting plays. Around the same time he adopted his mother's surname, becoming August Wilson, a choice that signaled both personal allegiance and artistic direction. It was during these years that he began to imagine the project that would define his career: a cycle of plays chronicling African American life across the twentieth century, decade by decade.

Breakthrough and the Century Cycle
Wilson's break came through the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center's National Playwrights Conference, where his early plays received development and vital attention. The artistic director Lloyd Richards, a giant of American theater who had previously directed the work of Lorraine Hansberry, became Wilson's most influential champion. Under Richards's guidance, Wilson's Ma Rainey's Black Bottom premiered at Yale Repertory Theatre and opened on Broadway in 1984. Set in a Chicago recording studio in 1927, it showcased his hallmarks: musical language, generational conflict, and the collision of personal ambition with the machinery of American industry and racism.

What followed was the most significant body of work by an American playwright since Eugene O'Neill: the ten-play Century Cycle, also known as the Pittsburgh Cycle. Nine of the plays are set in the Hill District, with Ma Rainey's Black Bottom the lone play set in Chicago. The sequence includes Jitney, Joe Turner's Come and Gone, Fences, The Piano Lesson, Two Trains Running, Seven Guitars, King Hedley II, Gem of the Ocean, and Radio Golf. Together they map the great migration, community economies, spirituality and folklore, labor and incarceration, and the shifting contours of Black dignity and aspiration across the decades. Fences won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the Tony Award for Best Play, with James Earl Jones's original performance helping to etch Troy Maxson into American dramatic lore. The Piano Lesson earned Wilson his second Pulitzer, a meditation on legacy in which a carved family piano bears the history of bondage and survival.

Collaborators and Interpreters
Wilson's ascent was inseparable from a network of collaborators who believed in his work and helped shape its production history. Lloyd Richards directed six of the early Century Cycle plays at Yale Rep and on Broadway, nurturing Wilson's development while introducing him to actors and designers who would become frequent interpreters. Among them, Charles S. Dutton gave defining performances in multiple Wilson dramas, embodying the playwright's blend of ferocity and lyricism. In the late 1990s Wilson and Richards parted ways, and the director Marion McClinton took up the mantle on subsequent productions, maintaining the high standards set during the Yale years. Wilson's personal and artistic life intertwined when he married the costume designer Constanza Romero, who collaborated on numerous productions and helped steward the work in its later stages. In Seattle, where the couple lived, Seattle Repertory Theatre became a crucial home; it is the only theater to have produced all ten plays of the cycle.

Method, Influences, and Themes
Wilson's craft grew from attentive listening. He collected stories in diners and barbershops, transcribed conversations into notebooks, and patiently forged scenes where anecdote turned into allegory. He spoke often of the influence of blues music and of visual artists like Romare Bearden, whose collages suggested to Wilson a way to layer time, memory, and community on stage. He wrote characters who refuse caricature: men and women with complicated moral lives, haunted by history yet inventive in the face of constraint. Aunt Ester, the spiritual matriarch who anchors several plays, becomes a vessel through which the Middle Passage and its afterlives are staged as living memory. Wilson's dramaturgy places ritual and folklore beside politics and economics, insisting that the theater can hold the full spectrum of Black life.

Public Stance and Debate
As his stature grew, Wilson used his platform to argue for a robust Black theater ecology. In 1996 he delivered The Ground on Which I Stand, a manifesto for cultural self-determination that called for greater support of Black institutions, playwrights, and audiences. The speech sparked a high-profile debate with critic and producer Robert Brustein over race, funding, and representation in American theater. Their public exchange, including a Town Hall debate in New York, crystallized fault lines in the field and forced institutions to confront the ways access and authority are distributed. Wilson's position was unequivocal: Black theater should not be a guest in its own house.

Late Work, Illness, and Legacy
In his final years Wilson continued to expand his range. He premiered Gem of the Ocean and Radio Golf, bookends of the cycle that converse across a century about property, citizenship, and the costs of progress. He also created a candid, often humorous solo piece, How I Learned What I Learned, co-conceived with his collaborator Todd Kreidler, tracing the lessons, humiliations, and triumphs of a self-taught writer from Pittsburgh. Diagnosed with liver cancer in 2005, Wilson died in Seattle on October 2 of that year, at age sixty. The Broadway house formerly known as the Virginia Theatre was renamed the August Wilson Theatre soon after his death, a historic recognition of his place in American culture.

Continuing Influence
Wilson's work has remained powerfully alive in revival and adaptation. Denzel Washington and Viola Davis led celebrated stage and screen incarnations of Fences, renewing public attention to Wilson's dialogue and deepening its reach across generations. Ma Rainey's Black Bottom found a new audience in a film interpretation that showcased the indelible characters Wilson crafted decades earlier. In Pittsburgh, the city that shaped him, institutions and community groups keep his legacy visible, not just in buildings that bear his name but in the continued performance and study of the plays. Actors, directors, and scholars return to the Hill District cycle as a living archive of twentieth-century Black experience and a master class in theatrical language.

Assessment
August Wilson transformed the American stage by insisting that the ordinary lives of Black Americans contain epic dimensions. His mother's example, the Hill District's street-corner wisdom, the mentorship of Lloyd Richards, the partnership of artists like Marion McClinton and Constanza Romero, the support of colleagues from Rob Penny to Todd Kreidler, and the passionate work of actors such as James Earl Jones and Charles S. Dutton all helped bring that epic to the stage. The result is a canon that has entered the national bloodstream. Across ten plays he built a monument from voices often dismissed or unheard, and he did it with the patience of a historian and the ear of a bluesman. That combination has kept his work urgent long after his passing, a testament to his conviction that the theater can hold a people's history and still swing.

Our collection contains 9 quotes who is written by August, under the main topics: Love - Writing - Poetry - Equality - Legacy & Remembrance.

Other people realated to August: Denzel Washington (Actor), Charles S. Dutton (Actor), Samuel L. Jackson (Actor), Branford Marsalis (Musician), John Legend (Musician), Vincent Canby (Critic), Viola Davis (Actress), Laurence Fishburne (Actor), Jack Kroll (Editor), Phylicia Rashad (Actress)

• Wikipedia