AW
Meet the Author

August Wilson

American · 1945–2005 · Playwright

A Pittsburgh playwright who wrote a cycle of ten plays, one for each decade of the twentieth century, to chart Black American life, setting nine in his home neighborhood.

1 StoryBites Edition1 Big Book
Start with Fences → Browse the editions

Why read August Wilson?

Fences is set in a Pittsburgh backyard in the 1950s, where Troy Maxson, a garbage collector who once starred in the Negro Leagues, is building a fence and holding his family to rules shaped by his own hard past. His son Cory wants a college football scholarship, and Troy’s refusal to let him chase it sets off the play’s central fight. Wilson writes long, funny, musical speeches, and Troy is a talker whose stories are part boast and part confession. Read it for a father who both shelters and harms his family, and for a family deciding what to keep of him.

A life in six dates

  1. 1945Born Frederick August Kittel Jr. in the Hill District of Pittsburgh
  2. 1965Begins writing poetry in Pittsburgh
  3. 1984Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom opens on Broadway
  4. 1987Fences opens on Broadway and wins the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the Tony Award for Best Play
  5. 1990The Piano Lesson wins his second Pulitzer Prize
  6. 2005Dies in Seattle, months after Radio Golf, the last play of his cycle, premieres

Themes across the work

PlaysAmerican literatureFamily dramaFathers and SonsTragedy

The StoryBites Editions

Context that actually matters

The Pittsburgh Century CycleWilson’s cycle has ten plays, each set in a different decade of the twentieth century, and all but Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom take place in Pittsburgh’s Hill District. Fences is his play of the 1950s.
The Hill DistrictWilson grew up in this Black neighborhood of Pittsburgh, and he filled his plays with the talk, work, and music of its people.
The Negro Leagues and baseball’s color lineBlack players were shut out of the major leagues until Jackie Robinson joined the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947, too late for a player of Troy’s age, which feeds his bitterness about Cory’s chances.

Reading the plays and snagging on the language? A Glossary of Common Shakespearean Words →