Wilson had a long association with the Penumbra Theatre Company of St Paul, which gave the premieres of some Wilson plays. In 1980, he received a fellowship for The Playwrights' Center in Minneapolis. In 1978 Wilson moved to Saint Paul, Minnesota at the suggestion of his friend director Claude Purdy, who helped him secure a job writing educational scripts for the Science Museum of Minnesota. Wilson also co-founded the Kuntu Writers Workshop to bring African-American writers together and to assist them in publication and production. In 1976 Vernell Lillie, founder of the Kuntu Repertory Theatre at the University of Pittsburgh two years earlier, directed Wilson's The Homecoming. Among these early efforts was Jitney ,which he revised more than two decades later as part of his 10-play cycle on 20th century Pittsburgh. His first play, Recycling, was performed for audiences in small theaters and public housing community centers. In 1968, Wilson co-founded the Black Horizon Theater in the Hill District of Pittsburgh along with his friend Rob Penny. His mother raised the children alone by the time he was five in a two-room apartment above a grocery store at 1727 Bedford Avenue.Īugust Kittel changed his name to August Wilson to honor his mother after his father's death in 1965. Earlier, Wilson's maternal grandmother walked from North Carolina to Pennsylvania in search of a better life. and Daisy Wilson, an African American cleaning woman, from North Carolina. in the Hill District of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the fourth of six children to German immigrant baker, Frederick August Kittel, Sr. Wilson was born Frederick August Kittel, Jr. Each is set in a different decade, depicting the comic and tragic aspects of the African-American experience in the twentieth century.

His literary legacy is the ten play series, The Pittsburgh Cycle, for which he received two Pulitzer Prizes for Drama. This is a modern classic, a book that deals with the impossibly difficult themes of race in America, set during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 60s.Īugust Wilson was an American playwright. But the 1950s are yielding to the new spirit of liberation in the 1960s, a spirit that is changing the world Troy Maxson has learned to deal with the only way he can, a spirit that is making him a stranger, angry and afraid, in a world he never knew and to a wife and son he understands less and less. Troy Maxson has gone through life in an America where to be proud and black is to face pressures that could crush a man, body and soul. It's a spirit that is making him a stranger, angry and afraid, in a world he never knew and to a wife and son he understands less and less.

But the 1950s are yielding to the new spirit of liberation in the 1960s.

In the powerful, stunning dramatic work that won August Wilson his first Pulitzer Prize, Troy Maxson has gone through life in a country where to be proud and black was to face pressures that could crush a man, body and soul.

Fences august wilson book