August Wilson

At 60 years old, August Wilson has this physical status:

August Wilson (April 27, 1945 – October 2, 2005) was an American playwright whose output included a series of ten plays, The Pittsburgh Cycle, for which he received two Pulitzer Prizes for Drama.

Each work in the collection is set in a different decade and depicts comic and tragic facets of the African-American experience in the twentieth century.

Early life

Wilson was born Frederick August Kittel Jr., the fourth of six children in the Hill District of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Frederick August Kittel Sr., a Sudeten German immigrant who was a baker/pastry cook, was his father. Daisy Wilson, an African-American woman from North Carolina who worked at homes for a living, was his mother. Wilson's anecdotal history reveals that his maternal grandmother walked from North Carolina to Pennsylvania in order to ensure a happier life. Wilson's mother raised the children alone until he was five years old in a two-bedroom apartment behind a supermarket store in Bedford Avenue; his father was mostly absent from his childhood. Wilson later wrote under his mother's surname.

Black Americans, Jewish, and Italian immigrants dominated the economically impoverished neighborhood where he was raised. The Kittel siblings had a difficult time as they were biracial. August had trouble finding a sense of belonging to a particular culture and did not think he fully fitted into African-American culture or White culture until later in life. Wilson's mother divorced his father and married David Bedford in the 1950s, and the family moved from the Hill District to Hazelwood's then mainly White working-class neighborhood, where they encountered racial bigotry; bricks were thrown through a window. They were soon forced out of their house and onto their next home.

Several plays in the Pittsburgh Cycle followed the Hill District, with the latter becoming the scene of several plays. His experiences as a young matriarch influenced the way his plays were written.

Wilson, 1959, was one of 14 African-American students at Central Catholic High School, but after one year, she was suspended. He then attended Connelley Vocational High School but found the curriculum unchallenging. In 1960, he dropped out of Gladstone High School after his teacher accused him of plagiarizing a 20-page paper he wrote on Napoleon I of France. Wilson kept his decision from his mother because he didn't want to disappoint her. He began serving menial jobs, where he encountered a number of his later characters were based, such as Sam in The Janitor (1985).

Wilson's extensive use of the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh culminated in the awarding of an honorary high school diploma later. Wilson, who said he learned to read at the age of four, began reading Black writers at the library when he was 12 years old and spent the remainder of his teenage years learning himself through Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, Arna Bontemps, and others.

Personal life

Wilson was married three times. Brenda Burton, 1969 to 1972, was his first marriage. Sakina Ansari, a 1970s girl, had only one son, Sakina Ansari. He married Judy Oliver, a social worker, in 1981, and they divorced in 1990. He married again in 1994 and was survived by his third wife, costume designer Constanza Romero, who appeared on The Piano Lesson's set. Azula Carmen Wilson Wilson, Wilson's daughter, lived with them. Wilson was also survived by siblings Freda Ellis, Linda Jean Kittel, Donna Conley, Barbara Jean Wilson, Edwin Kittel, and Richard Kittel.

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Career

Wilson knew he wanted to be a writer but his mother, who wanted him to be a lawyer, was distraught. She coerced him to leave his family home and enlisted in the United States Army for a three-year career in 1962, but after one year, he returned to various odd jobs as a porter, short-order cook, and dishwasher.

Since his father's death in 1965, Frederick August Kittel Jr. changed his name to August Wilson to honor his mother. He learned the blues as sung by Bessie Smith and bought a stolen typewriter for $10, which he used to pawned when funds were scarce. He decided he was a writer at 20 and submitted his work to such magazines as Harper's. He began writing in bars, the local cigar store, and cafes, in the midst of absorbing the voices and characters around him. He loved writing about cafe napkins because, he said, it freed him up and made him less self-conscious as a writer. He'll then gather the papers and type them up at home. Wilson, who was gifted with a gift for catching dialect and accents, had a "astonishing memory" that he used extensively throughout his career. He began to learn not to censor the words he encountered when incorporating it into his work.

Wilson's life and work were influenced by Malcolm X's words (such as The Ground On Which I Stand, 1996). Both the Nation of Islam (NOI) and the Black Power movement spoke to him about self-sufficiency, self-defense, and self-determination, as well as the origin myths that Elijah Muhammad embraced. Wilson married Brenda Burton, a Muslim, in 1969 and became affiliated with the NOI, but he did not convert. Sakina Ansari-Wilson, Brenda's one daughter, lived with him. In 1972, the two married in a suburb.

Wilson co-founded the Black Horizon Theater in Pittsburgh's Hill District, with his colleague Rob Penny. Wilson's first play, Recycling, was performed for audiences in small theaters, schools, and public housing community centers for 50 cents per ticket. Jitney, who appeared more than two decades later as part of his 10-play cycle in twentieth-century Pittsburgh, was one of those early efforts. He had no experience in directing. "Someone had looked around and said, 'Who's going to be the director,'" he said. I said, 'I will.' I said that because I knew how to read the library. I started looking for a book on how to direct a play. "I found one titled The Fundamentals of Play Directing and checked it out."

Wilson's The Homecoming was produced by Vernell Lillie, who had founded the Kuntu Repertory Theatre at the University of Pittsburgh two years earlier. Wilson's Sizwe Banzi is Dead, an Athol Fugard play that was held at the Pittsburgh Public Theater for the first time. Wilson, Penny, and poet Maisha Baton formed the Kuntu Writers Workshop in order to bring African-American writers together and assist them in writing and production. Both companies are still active.

Wilson moved to Saint Paul, Minnesota, at the behest of his friend, director Claude Purdy, who aided him in securing a position writing educational scripts for the Science Museum of Minnesota. He received a fellowship for The Playwrights' Center in Minneapolis in 1980. He left the Museum in 1981 but then went back to write plays. He was a part-time cook for the Little Brothers of the Poor for three years. Wilson had a long association with the Penumbra Theatre Company in St. Paul, which opened some of his plays. In 1980, he wrote Fullerton Street, which has been unproduced and unpublished. It came after the 1916 rebellion between Joe Louis and Billy Conn in 1941, and the loss of values attendant on the Great Migration to the urban North.

Wilson wrote the bulk of his books, including Jitney (1982), Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (1984), Fences (1985), and Come and Gone (1987).

George Latimer, the mayor of St. Paul, was elected on May 27 as "August Wilson Day" in 1987. He was honoured because he is the only person from Minnesota to win a Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

Wilson left St. Paul in 1990 after being divorced and migrated to Seattle. He developed an interest in Seattle Repertory Theatre, which culminated in his complete 10-play cycle and his one-man exhibition How I Learned What I Learned.

Even though he was devoted to writing for theater, a Hollywood studio suggested filming Wilson's Fences. "I declined a Black director not because of ethnicity, but because of culture," he insisted. White directors are not qualified for the job. "Someone who speaks about the specifics of the Black American culture needs to be hired for the position." The film was unmade until Denzel Washington directed Fences, starring Washington and Viola Davis. Wilson was given a posthumous Oscar nomination for the first time.

Wilson earned many honorary degrees, including an honorary Doctor of Humanities from the University of Pittsburgh, of which he served as a trustee from 1992 to 1995.

Wilson maintained a prominent presence in the growth and development of the (then) contemporary Black theater, clearly inspired by his youth's example, especially those from the Black Arts Movement. Wilson's most popular example of Wilson's strong views and critiques of what was Black theater's state in the 1990s was the "On Cultural Influence: Wilson's Opposition to the Black Theater," where Wilson called for a completely black theater with no Black seats filled by Blacks. On the other hand, he argued that Black actors should not appear in roles that were not specifically Black (e.g., no Black Hamlet). Brustein's vehemently opposed the anti-Browne campaign.

Wilson's final installment in his ten-part series The Century Cycle, titled Radio Golf, premiered in 2005. The Yale Repertory Theatre in New Haven, Connecticut, first performed it in 2005 and then in 2007 at the Cort Theatre. Wilson's last work will be published as Wilson's last work.

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