August Frederick Kittel Wilson, a prolific American writer whose plays, like Eugene O’Neill’s, Arthur Miller’s and Tennessee Williams’ are produced throughout the U.S. regularly soon became the most important voice in the American theater after Lorraine Hansberry, a position that he maintained until his death in 2005 with a string of acclaimed plays starting from Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom first exciting the theater world in 1984.
August Wilson mostly relies on the “4 B’s”: the Blues; fellow playwright, Amiri Bakara; Argentinian author, Jorge Luis Borges, and painter, Romare Bearden to tell what in his estimation he needs to tell in writing his plays. Apart from this, he has no particular method of writing his plays.
The blues have always had the greatest influence on Wilson, as he himself confessed in an interview with Sandra G. Shannon: “I have always consciously been chasing the musicians, It’s like our culture is in the music. And the writers are way behind the musicians… So I’m trying to close the gap.” 1
Wilson was also greatly influenced by playwright Amiri Baraka, who was part of the Black Art movement of the 1960’s. Through Baraka’s writing, Wilson “learned sociology and political commitment” and to include the emotions of anger and violence in his works. But far from supporting Baraka’s advocacy of a f95zone violent revolution, Wilson believed that African Americans need to develop a “collective self-reliance grounded in black history and culture” a preoccupation which seems more akin to that of his other mentor, Jorge Luis Borges.
Wilson was influenced not only by good writing but also by art as he claimed, that when he saw the painter Bearden’s work that was the first time that he saw black life presented in all its richness. He was so moved that he there and then resolved that he wanted to do just that-as he wanted his plays to be the equal of Bearden’s canvases. Wilson thus started creating authentic sounding characters that have brought a new understanding of the black experience to audiences in a series of plays, each one addressing African Americans in each decade of the twentieth century.
Although Wilson’s plays have not been written in chronological order, the consistent and key theme in each of them is the sense of disconnection suffered by blacks that have been uprooted from their original homeland, first from Africa and then their moving northwards away from the Jim Crowism of the slave holding south for the northern industrializing cities of Chicago and New York.
Wilson lamented that by their failure to develop their own tradition, which should be a more African response to the world, [African Americans] lost their sense of identity. Wilson has felt therefore that black people must strive to know their roots in order to understand themselves and then regain their lost identity. His plays have therefore been geared to demonstrate the black struggle to either gain this understanding and thence their identity-or escape from it.
Each of his ten plays set in a different decade of the 20th century enables Wilson to explore, often in very subtle ways, the myriad and mutating forms of the legacy of slavery. Each one of this cycle called “The Pittsburgh Cycle” or his “Century Cycle,” set in a different decade, depicting the comedy and tragedy of the African-American experience then, is unprecedented in American theater for its concept, size, and cohesion. Nine of them are set in Pittsburgh’s Hill District, an African-American neighborhood that takes on a mythic literary significance like Thomas Hardy’s Wessex, William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, or Irish playwright Brian Friel’s Ballybeg.
Although the plays are not strictly parts of a serial story, some characters appear (at various ages) in more than one of them. Children of characters in earlier plays may even appear in later ones. The character Aunt Ester, a “washer of souls” who is reported to be 285 years old in Gem of the Ocean, which takes place in her home at 1839 Wylie Avenue, and 322 in Two Trains Running and who dies in 1985, during the events of ‘King Hedley I1 is the most frequently mentioned in the cycle. In another, Radio Golf , much of the action revolves around plans to demolish and redevelop Aunt Ester’s house, some years after her death.
The plays often include an apparently mentally-impaired oracular character a different individual in each play – for example, Hedley [Sr.] in Seven Guitars, or Hambone in Two Trains Running. Most of the ideas for the plays have come from varied sources such as images, snippets of conversation, or lyrics from blues songs captured by Wilson’s ever-vigilant writer’s eye and ear. As a result of the influences from his immersion into the blues music culture, virtually all of his characters end up singing the blues to show their feelings at key dramatic moments in his plays.
The play Fences evolved from his seeing an image of a man holding a baby, and Joe Turner’s Come and Gone from the depiction of a struggling mill hand in a collage by acclaimed black painter Romare Bearden, whom Wilson has cited as having a particularly strong influence on his work.
Born Frederick August Kittel in the Hill District of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on April 27, 1945, Wilson, the fourth of six children, grew up in a black slum in a two-room apartment with no provision for hot water or a telephone above a grocery store at Bedford Avenue in an economically-depressed neighborhood inhabited predominantly by black Americans, as well as Jewish and Italian immigrants.
His father a white German immigrant baker, also named Frederick August Kittel, seldom spent time with his family. as Wilson reveals that his father very rarely came around. So he grew up in his mother’s household in a cultural environment which was black. His mother, Daisy Wilson, an African American cleaning woman from North Carolina, whose own mother had walked north from North Carolina to Pennsylvania in search of a better life, had to raise her six children relying on welfare checks and wages from house cleaning jobs thus managing to keep them clothed, guided, schooled and fed. According to him, she had a very hard time feeding Wilson and the rest of her children. But in spite of all that. Wilson admitted that he had a wonderful childhood. …For as a family, they did things together: saying the rosary every night at seven o’clock., sitting down and having dinner at a certain time. …and being that they didn’t have a TV, listening to the radio.
August Wilson’s induction into the racism and race-consciousness that was to be a constant theme in his works started in the late 1950s, when his mother married a black man, David Bedford, causing them to move from the Hill to a then predominantly white working class neighborhood, Hazelwood, where they encountered racial hostility with bricks being thrown through the windows at them. Though there was now racial unity if not harmony in the home, the relationship between Wilson and his stepfather was rocky even when he was a teenager. An ex-convict whose race prevented him from earning a football scholarship to college, David Bedford would become a source for Wilson’s protagonist Troy Maxson a former baseball player blocked from the major leagues by segregation in his play Fences, which won my interest in August Wilson a few years ago.
August Wilson’s literary career owes much to his mother who taught him to read very early, a process which to Wilson was transforming:him enabling him to unlock information and to be better able to understand the forces that are oppressing you. Learning to read at the age of four, Wilson consumed books voraciously, at first reading the Nancy Drew mysteries his mother managed to buy for the family. When he was 5 years old, he secured his first library card from the Hill District branch of the library on Wylie Avenue. He made such good use of it that he soon wore it out and cried when he lost it. At the age of 12 he was already a regular. client in the library. Wilson was not an exceptional student. He was so distracting that he soon developed a reputation for yelling answers out of turn in class.
His mother sent him to St. Richard’s parochial school in the Hill, and then to Central Catholic High School in Oakland. As the only black student there, he was constantly taunted and harassed. Threats and abuse drove him away in 1959, just before the end of his freshman year but the next school at which he enrolled, Connelly Vocational High School proved unchallenging.
So he switched to Gladstone High School, which was just across the street. Though he was supposed to move to the 10th grade but because he hadn’t graduated from the 9th at Central, he had to take 9th grade subjects. As the work was well behind what he had already done, he was bored and remained complacent until he decided he wanted to get into the after-school college club run by one of the teachers.
It was that teacher who, doubting that a black child could do that well on his own, writing such a well-written 20-page term paper on Napoleon as Wilson submitted accused him of plagiarism. This mostly white parochial high school also gave him a harsh dose of racism often finding notes on his desk which read “Nigger go home.” Sick of this he dropped out in the 10th grade in 1960 at the age of 15 and for a while not telling his mother.
“I dropped out of school, but I didn’t drop out of life,” as he recalled leaving the house each morning and going to the main branch of the Carnegie Library in Oakland “where they had all the books in the world. … I felt suddenly liberated from the constraints of a pre-arranged curriculum that labored through one book in eight months.”
At home, Wilson’s family had to endure racial taunts at the mostly white Hazelwood area of Pittsburgh. At age 15, Wilson began to educate himself, beginning in the “Negro” section of the public library, reading works by Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, Arna Bontemps, and other black writers, Wilson made such extensive use of the Carnegie Library to educate himself that they later awarded him a degree, the only such one they have bestowed anyone.
Like Richard Wright ,Wilson was caught up in the power of words. His fascination with language made him an avid listener, soaking up the conversations he overheard in coffee shops and on street corners, and using the titbits of conversations to construct stories in his head.
By his late teens, Wilson had dedicated himself to the task of becoming a writer. For by this time, he knew what he wanted to be, a writer, even though this created tension with his mother, who wanted him to become a lawyer. But when he continued to work at odd jobs, she got so fed up with what she considered his lack of direction that she forced him out of the home. He then got enlisted in the U.S. Army for a three-year stint in 1962, but somehow got himself discharged a year later, and went back to working odd jobs such as porter, short-order cook, gardener, and dishwasher
August Kittel changing his name to August Wilson thus honoring his mother after his father’s death in 1965 marked the symbolic starting point of his serious writing career. For that same year he bought a used typewriter, paying for it with twenty dollars that his sister, Freda, gave him for writing her a term paper on Robert Frost and Carl Sandburg. It was also the year that he discovered and first heard the blues, when he heard a tune sung by Bessie Smith entitled “Nobody in Town Can Bake a Sweet Jellyroll Like Mine.” He was mesmerized by the emotions that Smith’s sassy …
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