August Wilson
A Life
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4.6 • 5 Ratings
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
The “masterful” (The Wall Street Journal), “invaluable” (Los Angeles Times) first authoritative biography of August Wilson, the most important and successful American playwriting of the late 20th century, by a theater critic who knew him.
August Wilson wrote a series of ten plays celebrating African American life in the 20th century, one play for each decade. No other American playwright has completed such an ambitious oeuvre. Two of the plays became successful films, Fences, starring Denzel Washington and Viola Davis; and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, starring Viola Davis and Chadwick Boseman. Fences and The Piano Lesson won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama; Fences won the Tony Award for Best Play, and years after Wilson’s death in 2005, Jitney earned a Tony Award for Best Revival of a Play.
Through his brilliant use of vernacular speech, Wilson developed unforgettable characters who epitomized the trials and triumphs of the African American experience. He said that he didn’t research his plays but wrote them from “the blood’s memory,” a sense of racial history that he believed African Americans shared. Author and theater critic Patti Hartigan traced his ancestry back to slavery, and his plays echo with uncanny similarities to the history of his ancestors. She interviewed Wilson many times before his death and traces his life from his childhood in Pittsburgh (where nine of the plays take place) to Broadway. She also interviewed scores of friends, theater colleagues and family members, and conducted extensive research to tell the “absorbing, richly detailed” (Chicago Tribune) story of a writer who left an indelible imprint on American theater and opened the door for future playwrights of color.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Boston Globe journalist Hartigan debuts with an engrossing biography of playwright August Wilson (1945–2005). Writing from what he termed "the blood's memory," Wilson "depicted the ordinary lives of honorable people whose stories were ignored by mainstream culture," particularly working-class Black people in Pittsburgh, where he has born and raised. Hartigan details how Wilson triumphed over a hardscrabble childhood to launch his landmark 10-play cycle on Black life in 20th-century America, starting with Jitney! in 1979 and reaching Broadway in 1983 with Ma Rainey's Black Bottom. He achieved his greatest success with 1987's Fences, which "memorably a Black family to life on Broadway in a way that hadn't been achieved since Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun," though Hartigan notes the play is also Wilson's most "conventional," with characters "planted firmly in the soil of Pittsburgh in 1957"; later works were imbued by a "deep mysticism" and populated with "characters... haunted by four hundred years of bloody history." Drawing on original interviews with the playwright, Hartigan meticulously renders Wilson's often contentious relationships with collaborators and actors; his painstaking "rewrite and refine" process; and the complexities and limitations of his legacy—he "never asked to be ‘the Black artistic spokesperson,'... he wrote what he knew, which is precisely what he told other writers to do." This will serve as the definitive account of an essential American playwright.
