August Wilson

Celebrated for his penetrating studies of class, race, and family dynamics, acclaimed playwright August Wilson was born in Pittsburgh in 1945. An avid reader by the age of four, Wilson found school boring and unchallenging. When a teacher accused him of plagiarizing a report on Napoleon I of France in the tenth grade, Wilson dropped out in frustration and began self-educating through extensive reading at the Carnegie Library-so successfully that the institution later issued him an honorary diploma. Wilson soon began following the impulse to write, mainly relying on a cheap typewriter which he frequently pawned in times of particular hardship. He was known to scribble down notes on napkins and scraps of paper while at restaurants and bars, capturing memorable moments of interaction between people, which he would later incorporate into his plays. He debuted his first play, "Recycling," at the Black Horizons Theater in Pittsburgh in 1973. He would spend the next decade following odd jobs and fellowships to a number of cities, publishing the acclaimed "Jitney" in 1982. By 1984, Wilson had fully blossomed as a playwright, with his celebrated "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom" opening on Broadway. It was followed by plays like "Joe Turner's Come and Gone," "Fences," and "The Piano Lesson," eventually cultivating a collection of ten loosely interconnected, highly acclaimed plays that Wilson dubbed "The Pittsburgh Cycle," many of which dealt with similar themes and some shared characters. Over the course of his career, he would win a Tony Award, two Pulitzers, a Drama Desk Award, and a number of other accolades including a National Humanities Medal and a place in the American Theatre Hall of Fame. Wilson published his final play, "Radio Golf," in 2005. He died that same year at the age of 60. Wilson scored a posthumous Oscar nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay for the film "Fences" (2016), directed by and starring Denzel Washington, who had starred in the original Broadway production.