August Wilson's American Century
Life as Art
-
- USD 21.99
-
- USD 21.99
Descripción editorial
Playwright August Wilson is best known for his American Century Cycle, a sequence of ten plays—including the Pulitzer Prize–winning Fences and The Piano Lesson—that chronicle the lives of Black Americans in each decade of the twentieth century. But behind the celebrated plays stands a complex man shaped by his hometown’s vibrant Black culture. In August Wilson’s American Century: Life as Art, Laurence A. Glasco, one of the foremost historians of Black life in Pittsburgh, draws on Wilson’s early poetry, archival material, and original interviews with family members, neighbors, and friends to show how the city and its residents shaped the playwright and his work. Wilson’s overlapping identities as an outsider, warrior, race man, and poet helped him persevere in the face of setbacks, weave real-life observations with his poetry to craft memorable dialogue and compelling characters, and portray the realities of race in America in ways that have resonated with theatergoers and readers ever since. Glasco uncovers the story of how the people and places of Pittsburgh remained with Wilson after he left his hometown, shining through in a body of work that brought the struggles and triumphs of the Black experience to a wide audience and changed American theater for the better.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Historian Glasco (coauthor of August Wilson) meticulously chronicles the life of 20th-century playwright August Wilson through the prism of his home city. Raised in Pittsburgh's predominately Black Hill District but sent to parochial school, Wilson (1945–2005) grew up as something of an "outsider." As a kid he cut class to read in the public library, and after graduation he wandered the city jotting down observations and conversation snippets that honed his ear for dialogue. After riots erupted in Pittsburgh following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, Wilson became increasingly involved with the Black Nationalist movement and eventually cofounded the city's Black nationalist theater, Black Horizons. Yet he remained true to "his own conception of what it means to be African American," the author notes, eschewing a "stronger racial message" in his work for "confessional, apolitical poetry" that sometimes drew his peers' ire. Later, his hometown inspired his famous Pittsburgh Cycle, including such hits as 1985's Fences, which explored Black identity and ancestry as well as universal themes of love, duty, and betrayal. Drawing on interviews with Wilson's former neighbors, classmates, and relatives, Glasco paints a richly detailed portrait of how the playwright's relationship to his home—as both native son and outsider—shaped the settings and thematic preoccupations of his plays. It's a fresh angle on the oeuvre of a preeminent American dramatist.
