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Brief
Biography
August Wilson,
Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, was born in 1945 in the
Hill District of Pittsburgh, PA, the setting of many of his
plays, including Seven Guitars. He first became
involved in theatre in the late 1960’s, as a co-founder of
Black Horizons, a Pittsburgh community theatre. His first
play to be produced - at St. Paul’s Penumbra Theatre in 1981
- was Black Bart and the Sacred Hills, a satirical
western he adapted from an earlier series of poems. After
several unsuccessful submissions to the National Playwrights
Conference of the O’Neill Theatre Center in Connecticut,
Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom was accepted
for a workshop in 1982. The workshop marked the beginning of
Wilson’s association with director Lloyd Richards, head of
the Playwrights Conference. With Ma Rainey and his
subsequent plays, Fences, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, The
Piano Lesson, Two Trains Running, and Seven Guitars,
Wilson explored the heritage and experience of
African-Americans over the course of the twentieth century.
He has won Pulitzer Prizes for Fences (1987), and for
The Piano Lesson (1990), as well as the New York
Drama Critics Circle Awards for Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,
Fences, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, The Piano Lesson,
and Two Trains Running. He has received several
fellowships, including the Rockefeller and Guggenheim
Fellowships in Playwrighting, and is a winner of the Whiting
Writers Award. He is an alumnus of New Dramatist, and a
member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was
recently inducted into the American Academy of Arts and
Letters. |
