August Wilson Biography Essay

About the August Wilson

The Award-winning dramatist August Wilson was one of great writer of 21st century. Playwright August Wilson was born Frederick August Kittel in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on April 27, 1945. His mother, Daisy Wilson, was of African-American heritage. His father was a German immigrant named Frederick Kittel who was mostly absent from the family, thus he would later adopt is mother’s last name(PBS).

Wilson’s early years were spent in the Hill District of Pittsburgh, a poor but lively neighborhood that became the setting for most of his plays. Primarily self-educated going through several high schools because of abuse, he quit school in 1960 at age 15 after being accused of having plagiarized a 20-page paper he wrote on Napoleon I of France(courttheatre). By this time, Wilson knew that he wanted to be a writer, but this created tension with his mother, who wanted him to become a lawyer. She forced him to leave the family home and he enlisted in the United States Army for a three-year stint in 1962, but left after one year and went back to working

He often explained that he got his education from the four B’s: the blues, the art of painter Romare Bearden and the writing of poet Amiri Baraka and writer/poet Jorge Luis Borges. "The foundation of my playwriting is poetry," Wilson once said(Thegreenspace). Moreover, as time when on Wilson would go on to form his cycle of 10 plays that chronicle the 20th century African-American experience. Each play is set in a different decade and collectively became known as the Century Cycle or the Pittsburgh Cycle(PBS). Wilson explores a century’s worth of African-American struggle and triumph in his plays, beginning with the complex narrative of freedom at the turn of the century (Gem of the Ocean) and ending with the assimilation and sense of alienation of the 1990s (Radio Golf). “Put them all together,” Wilson once said, “and you have a