Wilson, August

(born April 27, 1945, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, U.S.) American playwright, author of a cycle of plays, each set in a different decade of the 20th century, about black American life. He won Pulitzer Prizes for Fences (1986) and for The Piano Lesson (1990).

Largely self-educated, Wilson grew up in poverty and quit school at age 15. He joined the black aesthetic movement in the late 1960s, became the cofounder and director of Black Horizons Theatre in Pittsburgh (1968), and published poetry in such journals as Black World (1971) and Black Lines (1972). In 1978 he moved to St. Paul, Minnesota, and in the early 1980s he wrote several plays, including Jitney (2000; first produced 1982) and the unpublished Fullerton Street.

Wilson's first major play, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (1985), opened on Broadway in 1984. Set in Chicago in 1927, the play centres on a verbally abusive blues singer, her fellow black musicians, and their white manager. Fences, first produced in 1985, is about a conflict between a father and son in the 1950s.

Wilson's chronicle of the black American experience continued with Joe Turner's Come and Gone (1988), a play about the lives of residents of a Pittsburgh boardinghouse in 1911; The Piano Lesson, set in the 1930s and concerning a family's ambivalence about selling an heirloom; and Two Trains Running (1992), whose action takes place in a Pittsburgh coffeehouse in the 1960s. Seven Guitars (1996), the sixth play of the cycle, is set among a group of friends who reunite following the death of a local blues guitarist. King Hedley II (2000) is set in the Hill district of Pittsburgh in the 1980s. Music, particularly jazz and blues, was a recurrent theme in Wilson's works, and its cadence was echoed in the lyrical, vernacular nature of his dialogue.