August Wilson’s accomplishments as a playwright are without parallel in modern theatre history. In a career spanning more than four decades, Wilson emerged as one of the most imaginative and sophisticated chroniclers of African American life, culture, and history by completing a cycle of ten plays – referred to throughout this volume as the American Century Cycle – between 1982 and 2005, the year of his untimely death at the age of sixty. Wilson came to the idea of creating a decade-by-decade cycle of dramas somewhat serendipitously. Having started out writing poetry, early experiments in theatrical storytelling yielded several works, including Recycle (1973), The Homecoming (1976), Black Bart and the Sacred Hills (1977), The Coldest Day of the Year (1977), and Fullerton Street (1980). Though he would not include it in the American Century Cycle, Wilson often cited the 1940s-set Fullerton Street as a key inspiration for the project. As he explained in an interview with Sandra G. Shannon:
I didn’t start out with a grand idea. I wrote a play called Jitney!, set in ’71, and a play called Fullerton Street that I set in ’41. Then I wrote Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, which I set in ’27, and it was after I did that I thought, “I’ve written three plays in three different decades, so why don’t I continue to do that?”1
The decision to follow this impulse would prove auspicious. Indeed, it would ultimately help cement Wilson’s reputation as one of the most consequential playwrights of the late twentieth- and early twenty-first centuries.
The plays in the American Century Cycle have been read, studied, and produced widely across the globe. Each set in a different decade of the twentieth century, they include Jitney (1982); Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (1984); Fences (1987); Joe Turner’s Come and Gone (1988); The Piano Lesson (1990); Two Trains Running (1991); Seven Guitars (1995); King Hedley II (1999); Gem of the Ocean (2003); and Radio Golf (2005). In addition to broad critical acclaim, Wilson also received numerous prizes and awards for this extraordinary project throughout his career – two Pulitzer Prizes for Drama (Fences, 1987; The Piano Lesson, 1990) among them. His path to becoming one of the most celebrated playwrights of recent decades, of course, was in no way predetermined.
Born Frederick August Kittel, Jr. on April 27, 1945, and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the once-thriving industrial city that looms large throughout the American Century Cycle, nothing about Wilson’s upbringing suggested that he would become a writer at all. Wilson’s mother, Daisy Wilson, was an African American domestic worker, and his father, Frederick August Kittel, was a German immigrant and baker who abandoned the family during Wilson’s youth. Wilson mostly grew up among his mother’s relatives in and around the Hill District, the historically African American section of Pittsburgh that many of his most well-known characters also call home. Despite its rich cultural history and spirit, Wilson’s Hill District community could not shield him from the racism and discrimination that was prevalent throughout Jim Crow America. Correspondingly, after a white history teacher accused him of plagiarizing an assigned paper on Napoleon I when he was fifteen, Wilson decided to forgo formal schooling and engage in a self-learning process that activated and concentrated on his curiosities about Black history, culture, and experience. Frequent trips to local public libraries introduced the adolescent Wilson to many of the figures and forms that would ultimately motivate him to become a poet and, later, a playwright. “I was just beginning to discover racism, and I think I was looking for something,” he reflected in a 1987 interview with the New York Times, adding: “Those books were a comfort. Just the idea Black people would write books. I wanted my book up there, too. I used to dream about being part of the Harlem Renaissance.”2
Wilson’s encounters with the political ideas and aesthetic principles of the Black Arts Movement in the 1960s and 1970s would serve to intensify his desire to make his mark as a writer. He joined forces with several friends and fellow artists in 1968 to cofound Black Horizon Theatre in Pittsburgh. The company, which received early funding and support from the Black Action Society at the University of Pittsburgh, where Rob Penny, another cofounder, served on the faculty, provided a forum for Wilson and his collaborators to conjoin their artistic and Black nationalist ambitions. It was also during this period that Wilson began to embrace drama as an ideal form for wrestling with broader questions and themes concerning the shifting contexts of Black life in the United States. Encouraged by Claude Purdy, another dear friend and early champion of his dramatic writing, Wilson left Pittsburgh in 1978 and relocated to St. Paul, Minnesota. In between working odd jobs and spending time in local haunts writing, he met several of the people who would become instrumental in the development of the American Century Cycle, including Lou Bellamy, founding Artistic Director of Penumbra Theatre Company, and Marion McClinton, who would later direct both King Headley II and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom on Broadway.
The work of writer-activist Amiri Baraka, artist Romare Bearden, writer Jorge Luis Borges, and the methods and messages of the Blues especially resonated with Wilson as he was honing his craft and artistic voice. Often referred to as the “four Bs,” each would serve as vital resources and springboards for the playwright’s approaches to dramatic structure and storytelling. Correspondingly, they, along with writers James Baldwin and Ed Bullins, who Wilson also routinely cited as vital influences, provide important contexts for understanding and appreciating the playwright’s artistic achievements. So, too, does Pittsburgh, which, for Wilson, proved to be an especially potent site for exploring the African American struggle to make freedom mean something in the aftermath of chattel slavery and the failures of Reconstruction in the United States.
Wilson no doubt understood his work as belonging to a rich genealogy of Black artistic expression and activism aimed at further bolstering the project of Black liberation through the dismantling of the anti-Black status quo. If there was ever any doubt about the stakes of making work for the stage for him, the keynote address he delivered at the 11th biennial Theatre Communications Group (TCG) conference in 1996 proved to be clarifying. Tilted “The Ground on Which I Stand,” the speech would activate important debate about the racial and representational politics of the American theatre as it anticipated the arrival of a new century and millennium. Labeling himself a “race man,” Wilson used his remarks to call out some of the ways theatres and other cultural institutions remained structured by inequities and inequalities. He was particularly emphatic in his demand for the distribution of more financial resources to support and sustain Black theatre companies. “If you do not know, I will tell you: Black theatre in America is alive, it is vibrant, it is vital … it just isn’t funded,” he asserted.3 He added:
I stand myself and my art squarely on the self-defining ground of the slave quarters and find the ground to be hallowed and made fertile by the blood and bones of the men and women who can be described as warriors on the cultural battlefield that affirmed their self-worth. As there is no idea that cannot be contained by black life, these men and women found themselves to be sufficient and secure in their art and their instructions.4
While Wilson had given countless talks and interviews by the time he arrived at the McCarter Theatre Center for the Performing Arts in Princeton, New Jersey, for the TCG conference, “The Ground on Which I Stand” would firmly establish him as one of the most incisive, if controversial commentators on issues of race, art, and culture.
That Wilson’s work continues to be revived in various venues – from Broadway and regional theatres to community and college stages – speaks to his enduring power and impact. Wilson maintains his position as an indispensable figure in the theatre, in part, because he offers a diverse range of characters for actors to perform. To be cast in a production of one of Wilson’s plays and be afforded the opportunity to embody one of his meticulously crafted characters is a gift for the novice and established actor alike. As Ruben Santiago-Hudson observes, “Anytime you get a chance to put August Wilson’s words in your mouth, it’s a great feeling as an actor because his poetry, his language, his rhythms are so beautiful. When you get that opportunity, you take it.”5 A common thread throughout these and similar reflections is Wilson’s way with language, rhythm, the complexity of his characters, and his commitment to illustrating what Santiago-Hudson refers to as “the frustration and the glory of being Black.”6 Actor James Earl Jones, who originated the role of Troy Maxson in Fences on Broadway, affirms this by noting, “He’s so faithful to the Blackness. He’s faithful like a father – that represents fidelity to him.”7
Even as the American Century Cycle illuminates an expansive and unique history, essentially forming an African American epic, a significant strength of the project’s dramaturgy is that each play can stand on its own. This means that theatre companies have numerous options to choose from when planning their seasons. And productions of Wilson’s work are proven draws for more diverse audiences; Black theatregoers, in particular, often purchase tickets to performances of Wilson’s dramas in great numbers. Playwright William Branch pointed to the ways Wilson’s work was helping to transform audience demographics as early as 1992, declaring: “Don’t ever try to tell me again that Black folks just won’t go to the theatre!”8 The shifting demographics that have resulted from producing Wilson’s plays should be understood as a transformative political act.
Christopher Bigsby explains that Wilson “did not write to precipitate social change but to offer a new perspective on lives whose modes of articulation, vision, traditions, assumptions might be distinct and distinguishing but whose human necessities are immediately recognizable. Meanwhile, the elevation of those lives into art itself stood as a statement.”9 To Bigsby’s point, it is important to underline that Wilson continues to be taken up across critical and popular arenas. Indeed, his body of work is more relevant now than ever, inviting scholars, artists, educators, and enthusiasts to probe how it continues to function as a conduit for examining various aspects of Black history and culture and as a guide for remaking a world where Black life is not always valued.
Of course, Wilson’s plays continue to inspire a rich and robust body of scholarship about his expansive dramaturgical imagination. In addition to the abundance of essays published in critical collections and academic journals, more recent scholarship on Wilson includes several notable anthologies: August Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle: Critical Perspectives on the Plays edited by pioneering Wilson scholar Sandra G. Shannon (2016) and the instructive Approaches to Teaching the Plays of August Wilson (2016), edited by Sandra G. Shannon and Sandra L. Richards, among them.10 Alan Nadel’s The Theatre of August Wilson (2018) and Patrick Maley’s After August: Blues, August Wilson, and American Drama (2019) situate Wilson within the broader canon of American dramatic literature.11 Jen Bryant’s Feed Your Mind: A Story of August Wilson (with illustration by Cannaday Chapman) recognizes the importance of Wilson’s legacy for children in developing literacy skills.12 Kwame Dawes’s book of poems, City of Bones: A Testament (2017), which includes “Talk” – a direct salute to Wilson – further demonstrates the expansiveness of Wilson’s influence.13
The film adaptations of Fences (2016), Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (2020), and The Piano Lesson (2024), which exemplify a broader commitment to bringing all ten of the American Century Cycle plays to the big screen, have served to expand the audiences for Wilson’s work. This commitment is also extended to three recent documentaries, August Wilson: The Ground on Which I Stand (2015), Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom: A Legacy Brought to the Screen (2020), and Giving Voice (2020), which highlights the August Wilson Monologue Competition. Several organizations and institutions are also working to maintain Wilson’s prominence in art, culture, and scholarship. For example, the August Wilson Society, a national organization founded in 2006 on the Howard University campus, has become an intellectual hub for Wilson studies. Pittsburgh has also worked to fortify Wilson as a forever son of the City of Bridges through institutions such as the August Wilson African American Cultural Center, the August Wilson House, and the August Wilson Archive, which now resides in the Hillman Library at the University of Pittsburgh. Many of the contributors to this volume are members and supporters of these varied organizations and institutions, thus equipping them with a heightened appreciation for the importance and relevance of Wilson studies today.
This volume considers Wilson’s prominence in the canon of contemporary theatre and drama by granting the playwright and his singular body of work the nuanced critical and contextual analyses that they both warrant and demand. It features scholars and artists who provide fresh and compelling insights about Wilson’s life, practices, and contributions as a playwright and public intellectual. In curating the chapters, our aim, in part, was to provide readers with a deeper understanding of the conditions and circumstances that helped inform and enhance the making of Wilson’s artistic output. We also wanted the chapters to situate Wilson and his work in broader social, cultural, political, and aesthetic contexts.
Wilson often described the American Century Cycle as his effort to craft a 400-year autobiography of the African American experience. Given the vastness and richness of that experience – and the unique ways that Wilson renders and represents it in his storytelling – we have divided August Wilson in Context into four thematically organized sections. The chapters in Part I, “Influences and Inspirations,” contextualize the social and cultural conditions that informed Wilson’s creative work, as well as the aesthetic and political philosophies that guided him throughout his career. The chapters in Part II, “Politics and Debates,” examine major arguments and critical exchanges continuing to shape Wilson studies. The chapters in Part III, “Productions and Collaborations,” examine the production contexts of the work and reflect more broadly on Wilson as a collaborator, while the chapters in Part IV, “Critical and Comparative Contexts,” provide fresh analyses of Wilson’s dramaturgical approaches and strategies. Across all four parts, authors supply readers with original frameworks and analytical tools to examine and appreciate Wilson’s evocative body of work, including the plays comprising the American Century Cycle.
