August Wilson

August Wilson (April 27, 1945 – October 2, 2005) was born Frederick August Kittel Jr. in the Hill District of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the fourth of six children. His father, Frederick August Kittel Sr., was a German immigrant, who was a baker/pastry cook. His mother, Daisy Wilson, was an African-American cleaning woman from North Carolina. Wilson’s anecdotal history reports that his maternal grandmother walked from North Carolina to Pennsylvania in search of a better life. Wilson’s mother raised the children alone until he was five in a two-room apartment above a grocery store at 1727 Bedford Avenue; his father was mostly absent from his childhood. The economically depressed neighborhood where he was raised was inhabited predominantly by black Americans, Jewish and Italian immigrants.

Wilson knew that he wanted to be a writer, but this created tension with his mother, who wanted him to become a lawyer. She forced him to leave the family home and he enlisted in the United States Army for a three-year stint in 1962, but left after one year and went back to working various odd jobs as a porter, short-order cook, gardener, and dishwasher.

Frederick August Kittel Jr. changed his name to August Wilson to honor his mother after his father’s death in 1965. That same year, he discovered the blues as sung by Bessie Smith, and he bought a stolen typewriter for $10, which he often pawned when money was tight. At 20, he decided he was a poet and submitted work to such magazines as Harper’s. He began to write in bars, the local cigar store, and cafes—longhand on table napkins and on yellow notepads, absorbing the voices and characters around him. He liked to write on cafe napkins because, he said, it freed him up and made him less self-conscious as a writer. He would then gather the notes and type them up at home. Gifted with a talent for catching dialect and accents, Wilson had an “astonishing memory”, which he put to full use during his career. He slowly learned not to censor the language he heard when incorporating it into his work.

He became one of American best playwright whose work included a series of ten plays, The Pittsburgh Cycle, for which he received two Pulitzer Prizes for Drama. Each work in the series is set in a different decade, and depicts comic and tragic aspects of the African-American experience in the 20th century.