Immanu Amiri Baraka, previously known as LeRoi Jones, is an African-American playwright whose works span be-bop poetry and black nationalist plays. His notable plays, Dutchman and The Slave Ship (1966), are key examples of black nationalist literature. Wilson produced all of Baraka’s plays during his tenure at the Black Horizons Theater.

Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949) stands as one of the most renowned plays of the twentieth century. This Pulitzer Prize-winning drama is a quintessential example of the "well-made" play in the realist tradition, where escalating tensions centered around the main character unfold methodically from scene to scene, culminating in a dramatic conclusion. The central character, Willy Loman, is a failed salesman and family man whose sons, Biff and Happy, cannot realize his unfulfilled dreams. Wilson’s play Fences has been likened to Death of a Salesman, although Wilson has mentioned that he is not familiar with it.

Tennessee Williams’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955) explores the intense family conflicts arising from failed marriages, repressed sexuality, and the struggle to control a southern plantation. The play is a prime example of American naturalism.

Booker T. Washington’s seminal autobiography Up from Slavery (1901) defined a generation. Born into slavery on a Virginia plantation and freed at fifteen, Washington taught himself to read and walked nearly 500 miles to attend a vocational training institute. He was later appointed to lead the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. Although Washington faced criticism during his life and afterward for his cautious stance on racial issues, he was the most prominent and influential leader in the black community of his time.

Langston Hughes was a major figure of the Harlem Renaissance, a blossoming of African-American creativity in the early twentieth century. Hughes’s celebrated poetry collection, The Weary Blues (1926), which includes the iconic poem "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," launched his career and introduced audiences to a new style of poetry rooted in jazz rhythms and black vernacular. The first volume of his autobiography, The Big Sea (1940), offers an intriguing glimpse into his life in America and Europe during the 1920s.

Frederick Douglass, a nineteenth-century African-American abolitionist, published his autobiography, A Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, in 1845. It recounts his life as a slave and his journey to freedom. Douglass championed the abolitionist cause, organized black troops during the Civil War, and served in public office during the Reconstruction era.