Ma Rainey's Black Bottom | August Wilson Biography

Born in 1945 to a white father, Frederick August Kittle, and a black mother, Daisy Wilson August Wilson grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. A voracious reader who credits his mother for his love of language, Wilson dropped out of school in the ninth grade, educating himself at libraries. In 1962, Wilson enlisted in the U.S. Army but was discharged a year later. In 1965, he decided to become a writer, buying his first typewriter for twenty dollars. In 1968, he helped to found Pittsburgh’s Black Horizons on the Hill Theater, with the goal of ‘‘politicizing the community.’’ Wilson was heavily involved with the civil rights movement during this time and described himself as a ‘‘Black Nationalist.’’ After he moved to St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1978, Wilson’s career began to gather steam. Following the oft-given advice to write what you know, Wilson created characters that spoke like people he knew in black neighborhoods of Pittsburgh.

August Wilson

In 1980 the Playwright’s Center in Minneapolis accepted his play, Jitney, a drama set in a Pittsburgh taxi station, and in 1982 the prestigious Eugene O’Neill Center accepted Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. The success of this play helped catapult Wilson into the national limelight. Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom received the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for best play and an Antoinette Perry (‘‘Tony’’) Award nomination from the League of New York Theatres and Producers. Wilson’s next effort, Fences, was even more successful, garnering an Outstanding Play Award from the American Theatre Critics, a Drama Desk Outstanding New Play Award, a New York Drama Critics’ Circle Best Play Award, a Pulitzer Prize for drama, a Tony Award for best play, and a Best Broadway play award from the Outer Critics Circle. The latest installment in Wilson’s ambitious plan to write a ten-play cycle—each dealing with a decade in Black American history—is King Hedley II, which opened in 2001 on Broadway. Set during 1985 in Pittsburgh’s Hill District, King Hedley II explores the relationship between an ex-convict struggling to understand his life and the impoverished community in which he lives. Wilson continues to write and to speak out, from his home in Seattle, Washington, for the creation of and the funding for black theaters.