August wilson biography
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About August Wilson
August Wilson: The Writer’s Landscape: The first-ever exhibition dedicated to the life and works of August Wilson is now open! Learn More
About / About August
August Wilson was an American playwright best known for his extraordinary cycle of 10 plays that chronicle the 20th century African-American experience. All but one of Wilson’s masterful plays are set in the Hill District, the working-class neighborhood of his birth in 1945. Each play is set in a different decade and collectively became known as the American Century Cycle. “Put them all together,” Wilson once said, “and you have a history.”
August Wilson never formally studied theater. In fact, he dropped out of high school after being accused of plagiarism. He often explained that he instead got his education from the four B’s: the blues, the art of painter Romare Bearden, the writing of poet Amiri Baraka and writer/poet Jorge Luis Borges. “The foundation of my playwriting is poetry,” Wilson once said.
All of Wilson’s 10 play cycle have been produced on Broadway, two of which have won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama (Fences, 1987 and The Piano Lesson, 1990). Actors and directors that include Denzel Washington, Viola Davis, Laurence Fishburne, Mary Alice, Delroy Lindo, Leslie Ugg
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In just fifteen years, American playwright August Wilson has become one of the most important voices in modern theater. He has won acclaim from literary and theater critics for his plays, which portray the African American experience in the twentieth century, one decade at a time.
Born Frederick August Kittel in 1945 to a white German-American father and an African American mother, Wilson took his mother's name in the early 1970s. He grew up in Pittsburgh's ethnically diverse Hill District, where he was surrounded by the sounds, sights and struggles of urban African American life that would later fuel his creative efforts. But Wilson's appreciation for the culture in which he had grown up did not bloom fully until he moved to St. Paul, Minnesota, in his early thirties. From that distance, he gained an appreciation of the richness of the culture and the language of the place where he had spent his youth.
"In the Hill District, I was surrounded by all this highly charged, poetic vernacular which was so much part and parcel of life that I didn't pay any attention to it. But in moving to St. Paul and suddenly being removed from that environment and that language, I began to hear it for the first time and recognize its value," he says.
Originally a poet and short-story writer, W
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August Wilson Books and Sport Memorabilia
Biography
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