English Literature

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Abdel Sabour

Amany Abdel Sabour

Professor I. A. Abdel Ghani

Contemporary American Literature

1 January 2008

August Wilson;

A True Chronicler of Afro-American History,

With special reference to “The Piano Lesson”

August Wilson (, , ) was a -winning  , and he is one of seven American playwrights to win two Pulitzer prizes.  He is America's finest black dramatist, whose plays chronicled the lives of Afro-Americans through the 20th century. His "singular achievement and literary legacy is a  of ten plays—two of which won the —dubbed 'The Pittsburgh Cycle' "(August Wilson,Wikipedia), through which Wilson is depicting the comedy and tragedy of the  experience in the .

This cycle of plays, which is the main focus in this paper, is also referred to as his "Century Cycle" for which he will be remembered — each play, is set in a different decade of the 20th century, and each is chronicling a particular aspect of Afro-American history — as don Adams says ,"combines subtlety and weight, humor, pathos and a profound sympathy for small, seemingly insignificant people trapped by forces they seldom understand and usually are powerless to resist, let alone overcome" (Adams).

The acclaimed cycle embraces ten plays. In decade order the plays are:

  • 1900s -  (2003)
  • 1910s -  (1984)
  • 1920s -  (1982) - set in  
  • 1930s -  (1989) -  
  • 1940s -  (1995)
  • 1950s -  (1985) -  
  • 1960s -  (1990)
  • 1970s -  (1983)
  • 1980s -  (2001)
  • 1990s -  (2005)

 August Wilson" was not only the finest black dramatist" the United States of America has produced "but a dramatist whom posterity may well rate alongside Eugene O'Neill and Arthur Miller as one of his nation's most important"(,August Wilson, Times online). Born Frederick August Kittel on April 27, 1945, in the  of , , Wilson was the fourth of six children, three girls and two boys, and was of mixed race. His father was a   baker, also named Frederick August Kittel, who seldom spent time with his family and eventually succumbed to alcoholism, and his mother was an African American , Daisy Wilson, from . Earlier, Wilson's maternal grandmother walked from North Carolina to Pennsylvania in search of a better life. Wilson's parents stayed together until he was five.

Wilson's mother, Daisy, inherited her mother's strength and determination, qualities she needed to raise her six children in a two-room apartment in Bedford Avenue behind a grocery store in Pittsburgh's Hill District. Hill District was a poor neighborhood inhabited by black Americans, Italians, and Jews. During Wilson's teen years, "his mother married David Bedford, and the Bedford family moved from the Hill to a predominantly white working-class suburban neighborhood, Hazelwood, in the late 1950s [where] they encountered racial hostility"(August Wilson, African Americans), as bricks were thrown at their new home, and when Wilson transferred to Gladstone High School, he was subjected to additional racial incidents and prejudices.

The young Freddie, who was darker-skinned than his siblings, and was the only black student at  in 1959; threats and abuse drove him away, and when Wilson transferred to Gladstone High School, he was subjected to additional racial hostilities; "His white schoolmates frequently left notes on his desk advising, 'Nigger go home' " (African Americans).Yet an even greater insult to Wilson was the inability of a teacher to figure out how a black student could create a well written term paper. After reading Wilson's paper that was centered on Napoleon, the instructor accused him of plagiarism and refused to believe that he had researched and written the essay. The racial animosity exhibited at Gladstone led Wilson, at age 15, to drop out of school.

Wilson attended St. Richard's parochial school in the Hill, then to Central Catholic High School in Oakland in 1959. As the only black student in the school, he was constantly threatened and harassed, so he left just before the end of his freshman year. He attended Connelley Vocational High School where he felt he wasn’t challenged enough and switched to Gladstone High School. In 1960, Wilson dropped out of Gladstone at age 15 after a teacher accused him of plagiarizing a 20-page paper on Napoleon. He went on to receive his education at the Carnegie Library and in 1999; Wilson was awarded the first high school diploma given by the Carnegie Library.

                                                (Biographical Sketch of August Wilson)

Wilson was a good reader at his tender age, for his mother taught him to read when he was four, and at age five he got his first library card, from the Hill District branch library. Wilson consumed books voraciously, and at age twelve he was a regular at the local library. While he was pretending to his mother that he was still at school, he spent his days doing serious reading in the Pittsburgh Public Library. His devotion to the library proved to be decisive, because he educated himself at the Oakland District's Carnegie library, after dropping out of Gladstone High School at age 15.  At the library he "felt suddenly liberated from the constraints of pre-arranged curriculum that labored through one book in eight months"(August Wilson's Gem of the Ocean). 

Continued to learn through disciplined self-study at the Carnegie Library, Wilson began reading black writers at age 12, spent the remainder of his teen years educating himself by reading black works in the public library. Reading there at the Negro section, works by , Richard Wright,  Arna Bontemps, and other black writers. Wilson was caught up in the power of words Wilson's fascination with the power of words generated tension at home. During his teens, Wilson was determined to become a writer and worked at a series of odd jobs. His mother, who wanted Wilson to pursue a career as an attorney, disapproved and forced him to leave the family residence. He enlisted in the U.S. Army for a three-year stint in 1962, but left after one year and went back to working odd jobs such as a , , gardener, and dishwasher.

At age twenty, August Kittel "cemented his cultural loyalty by taking his mother's name, [and] becoming August Wilson" to honor his mother after his father's death in 1965(Biographical Sketch of August Wilson). That same year he discovered the  as sung by . By his late teens, Wilson had dedicated himself to the task of becoming a writer. The symbolic starting point of Wilson's serious writing career came in the same year 1965, when he bought a used typewriter, paying for it with twenty dollars that his sister Freda gave him for writing her a term paper.

 During the fall of 1965, Wilson moved to a rooming house in his native city. Wilson described himself in this period as "a twenty year old poet wrestling with the world and his place in it, having discovered the joy and terror of remaking the world in his own image through the act of writing" (African Americans). He supported himself by working at a series of menial low-paying jobs as dishwasher, short-order cook, porter,  and stock boy for approximately the next 12 or 13 years. During his leisure time, Wilson frequently sat in a restaurant and created poems on paper bags. His initial writing efforts were poetic, and although he did not gain fame as a poet, his poems were published in the late 1960s and early 1970s in several periodicals. Although some of Wilson's poems were published in some small magazines over the next few years, he failed to achieve recognition as a poet.

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        During the remainder of the 1960s, Wilson continued to write and was instrumental in founding two organizations that promoted black American writing: the Center Avenue Poets Theatre Workshop, formed in 1965, and  the Black Horizon Theatre, formed in 1968 which he co-founded in the Hill District of Pittsburgh along with his friend, Rob Penny, a playwright and teacher, in an effort to politicize black Americans and to increase their race consciousness. Wilson's earliest plays were written for Black Horizons, including: Recycling, written in 1973 and produced at a Pittsburgh community theater. His first play, Recycling, which drew on the unhappy ...

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