PLAYWRIGHT

Pittsburgh.

Growing up in "The Hill," an African American slum community in Pittsburgh, August Wilson was a voracious reader who was fascinated with words—with their sound, form, and meaning. Wilson's biological father, a white man, deserted the family when Wilson was young, and he was raised by his black mother and stepfather. When his family moved to the mostly white community of Hazelwood, they became targets of racial animosity. White classmates at a Roman Catholic academy harassed Wilson for being black, and a teacher accused him of cheating on a term paper about Napoleon. By the time Wilson quit school at age fifteen, he was educating himself, soaking up the works of black writers such as Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison, and Richard Wright. In 1965 he bought his first typewriter and started writing poetry, recording the rhythms of black speech he had picked up in his neighborhood. Some of Wilson's early...