August Wilson

This is the first authoritative biography of August Wilson, the American playwright of the late twentieth century whose work was among the most important and commercially successful of its time. Its author, Patti Hartigan, is a theater critic who knew Wilson personally and interviewed him many times before his death.

Wilson wrote a cycle of ten plays, one for each decade of the twentieth century, all depicting African American life across that span. No other American playwright has completed a body of work of such scope. Two of the plays were adapted into 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, and Fences also won the Tony Award for Best Play. Years after Wilson died in 2005, Jitney won the Tony Award for Best Revival of a Play.

Wilson's characters are remembered for their vivid, vernacular speech and for capturing the struggles and triumphs of the African American experience. He maintained that he did not research his plays. Instead, he said, he drew on a sense of racial history that he believed African Americans shared, which he called the blood's memory. Hartigan traced his ancestry back to slavery and shows how the events in his plays echo the history of those ancestors.

Hartigan follows Wilson's life from his childhood in Pittsburgh, where nine of the ten plays are set, to his rise on Broadway. She also interviewed many of his friends, theater colleagues and family members and carried out extensive research. The result is a portrait of a writer who left a lasting mark on American theater and opened the door for playwrights of color who followed him.