When August Wilson succumbed to liver cancer at the age of sixty, he died a proud, successful man — a self-made man who left a legacy that will not soon be forgotten. He set himself a challenge equivalent to climbing a great mountain: he would, he declared, write ten plays, each one set in a different decade of the 20^th century, chronicling the history of the African-American experience in this country. When he died, he had reached the summit of that mountain.

Born Frederick August Kittel on April 27, 1945, he was the son of Daisy Wilson, whose mother had walked to Pittsburgh from North Carolina after Emancipation. His father was Frederick Kittel, a German baker who wasn’t present in the family’s cold-water flat on Bedford Avenue in Pittsburgh’s Hill District. Wilson grew up in an African-American cultural environment; he had very little contact with his father over the course of his life, and shed his father’s name at twenty.

Wilson’s mother taught him to read at age four, and he quickly became a voracious reader. He was a regular at the Hill District branch of the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, and said in a speech at the 100^th anniversary of that library, "Labor historians do not speak well of Andrew Carnegie, but he will forever be for me that man who made it possible for me to be standing here today. I wore out my library card and cried when I lost it."

The Carnegie Library did more than supplement his education — it provided it. When he was a fifteen-year-old student at Gladstone High School, his teacher threw out a twenty-page report he had written on Napoleon, believing falsely that he had not done the work himself. Disgusted, he left school and never returned. Rather than admit to his mother what had happened, Wilson began spending his days at the main branch of the Carnegie Library in Oakland where he created his own educational curriculum and grappled with the great writers at his own pace. He remains the only person ever to be awarded a high school diploma by the Carnegie Library.

To come of age in the Hill District in the 1960s was to grow up in a neighborhood on the decline, but still clinging to life. Wilson’s substitute fathers were the men hanging out in grocery stores and diners and chatting on street corners, telling stories and singing songs. Wilson basked in this verbal culture, and it became a part of him. On April 1, 1965, using twenty dollars his sister had given him to write a term paper for her, August Wilson bought his first typewriter and declared himself a poet. He connected with other young black writers, and in 1968, he co-founded the Black Horizon Theater in Pittsburgh with Rob Penney. He began writing plays around this time, but did not seriously devote himself to drama until 1978 when, at the suggestion of director Claude Purdy, he moved to St. Paul, Minnesota and wrote the original, one-act version of Jitney. The play was a huge success, both in the Twin Cities and in Pittsburgh at the fledgling Allegheny Repertory Theatre. Wilson’s career as a playwright had begun in earnest.

In 1983, Wilson submitted his first full-length play, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, to the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center’s National Playwrights Conference, and was accepted. At the O’Neill, the play was championed by Lloyd Richards, the artistic director of the Yale Repertory Theatre and of the O’Neill Playwrights Conference. Richards immediately snapped up the rights, directing it himself at Yale Rep the next year in a smash production featuring Theresa Merritt as Ma Rainey and a young Charles S. Dutton in his breakout role as Levee. The play transferred to Broadway in 1984, and Wilson began to attract national attention. Wilson and Richards followed up with Fences, starring James Earl Jones and Mary Alice in 1987, winning Wilson his first Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the Tony Award for Best Play.

Flush with these successes, Wilson moved to Seattle in 1990 and continued to write the plays of his cycle. Along with his longtime producer Ben Mordecai (who had been the managing director of Yale Rep) and his directors — Richards, then Marion McClinton, and finally Kenny Leon — Wilson created a method of production and rewriting that used American regional theatres as a testing ground for his plays. At theatres like the Huntington Theatre Company, Seattle Repertory Theatre, Centerstage in Baltimore, Chicago’s Goodman Theatre, Pittsburgh Public Theater, and many others, Wilson would produce the premieres of his plays, but those premieres served only as first drafts. He and his team would move from theatre to theatre, from city to city, almost as if they were re-creating their own version of the 19^th century vaudeville circuit. The plays would be honed and refined all over the country before finally arriving on Broadway. With his prodigious talent August Wilson created something of a cottage industry and many African-American actors, directors, and designers across the country give him credit for keeping them working, and working on material close to their own experiences.

Success followed success and, one by one, Wilson told the stories of each decade of the 20^th century. He won his second Pulitzer Prize for The Piano Lesson in 1990 and wrote the screenplay for a TV movie of the play, which starred Alfre Woodard. For many years he worked to transform Fences into a feature film, but Hollywood could not fulfill his one demand: that the film be directed by an African-American director. He was frustrated by this failure and, in 1996, took out his frustration during the keynote address at the Theatre Communications Group Conference in a speech entitled "The Ground On Which I Stand." This speech excoriated the American theatre community for segregating the work of African-American artists and “ghettoizing” their plays — creating the “black play” slot. He called on African-American theatre artists to create their own parallel institutions for the production of their work. The speech was condemned by critic Robert Brustein in The New Republic, who accused Wilson of cultural separatism and championed the idea of color-blind and race-neutral casting in theatre. In 1997, Wilson and Brustein met at a public debate on the issue at New York’s Town Hall. While both scored points, neither walked away a decisive victor, but the debate itself reignited the idea that the theatre could be a place where the great questions of society could be addressed passionately and productively.

Meanwhile, Wilson’s work continued, and the cycle neared completion. When Radio Golf opened at the Yale Rep in May 2005, it marked the completion of a great life’s work, but Wilson already knew he was not long for this world. After the Yale production and a subsequent production in Los Angeles, Wilson secluded himself in Seattle to complete his revisions on the play. After a short hospitalization, he died on October 2, 2005, standing atop a theatrical mountain that he had both conceived and scaled.

— Kyle W. Brenton