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Birth of August Wilson
August Wilson was born Frederick August Kittel on April 27, 1945, to mother Daisy Wilson, a cleaning lady who primarily cared for August and his siblings, and his father, also Frederick August Kittel, a German immigrant and baker. -
Wilson’s dad leaves
Frederick August Kittel, left her and their children. Daisy Wilson later remarried, and in 1958 the family moved to a suburb of Pittsburgh. -
Wilson’s childhood home
Wilson grew up in the Hill District of Pittsburgh, a lively poor neighbourhood that became the setting for most of his plays. Together with five siblings, he was raised by his mother, Daisy Wilson, after his father, Frederick August Kittel, left her and their children. -
Wilson’s complexity
The complexity of Wilson’s experience of race while growing up would be expressed in his plays. His mother was Black, his father white, and his stepfather, David Bedford, Black. The Hill District was mostly Black, and the suburb, Hazelwood, was predominately white. -
Wilson’s racial encounters at the age of 15
Wilson and his family were the target of racial threats in Hazelwood, and he quit school at age 15 after being accused of having plagiarized a paper. He turned to self-education, reading intensively in a public library and returning to the Hill District to learn from residents there. -
Wilson embraces black arts movement
He changed his last name from Kittel to Wilson, and in the late 1960s he embraced the Black Arts movement. -
August Wilson’s passion
Wilson knew that he wanted to be a writer, but this created tension with his mother, who wanted him to become a lawyer. She forced him to leave the family home and he enlisted in the United States Army for a three-year stint in 1962, but he left after one year -
August Wilson’s dad died and he changed his name
Frederick August Kittel Jr. changed his name to August Wilson to honor his mother after his father's death in 1965. That same year, he discovered the blues as sung by Bessie Smith, and he bought a stolen typewriter for $10, which he often pawned when money was tight. -
August Wilson becomes Co-Founder of black horizon theatre
In 1968 he became the cofounder and director of Black Horizons Theatre in Pittsburgh. -
Wilson published his first poetry
He also published poetry in such journals as Black World (1971) and Black Lines (1972). -
Wilson relocated in st.Paul, Minnesota
In 1978 Wilson moved to St. Paul, Minnesota, and in the early 1980s he wrote several plays, including Jitney, which was first produced in 1982. -
Wilson’s work
Throughout the 1980s, Wilson wrote the majority of his work including Jitney (1982), Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (1984), Fences (1985), Joe Turner's Come and Gone (1986), and The Piano Lesson (1987). In 1987, St. Paul's mayor George Latimer named May 27 "August Wilson Day". He was honored because he is the only person from Minnesota to win a Pulitzer Prize for Drama.[6] -
Wilson’s first major play
His first major play, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, opened on Broadway in 1984 and was a critical and financial success. Set in Chicago in 1927, the play centres on a verbally abusive blues singer, her fellow Black musicians, and their white manager. -
He received an award!
Fences, first produced in 1985 and published in 1986, is about a conflict between a father and his son in the 1950s; it received a Tony Award for best play -
Wilson kept peruing his career
Wilson’s chronicle of the Black American experience continued with Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, first produced in 1986, a play about the lives of residents of a boardinghouse in 1911, and The Piano Lesson, first produced in 1987, which is set in the 1930s and explores a family’s ambivalence about selling an heirloom; it was adapted for television in 1995. -
Wilson moves for the last time to Seattle
In 1990 Wilson left St. Paul after getting divorced and moved to Seattle. There he developed a relationship with Seattle Repertory Theatre, which produced his entire 10-play cycle and his one-man show How I Learned What I Learned. -
August Wilson declines a white director
Though he was a writer dedicated to writing for theater, a Hollywood studio proposed filming Wilson's play Fences. He insisted that a Black director be hired for the film, saying: "I declined a White director not on the basis of race but on the basis of culture. -
August Wilson’s spouse (3rd wife)
Wilson was married three times. His first marriage was to Brenda Burton from 1969 to 1972. They had one daughter, Sakina Ansari, born 1970. In 1981, he married Judy Oliver, a social worker; they divorced in 1990. He married again in 1994 and was survived by his third wife, costume designer Constanza Romero, whom he met on the set of The Piano Lesson. -
August Wilson’s awards
Wilson received numerous honours during his career, including seven New York Drama Critics’ Circle Awards for best play. He also held Guggenheim and Rockefeller fellowships. -
Wilson’s final work installment
In 2005, Wilson's final installment in his ten-part series The Century Cycle, titled Radio Golf, opened. It was first performed in 2005 by the Yale Repertory Theatre in New Haven, Connecticut and had its Broadway premiere in 2007 at the Cort Theatre. It would become known as Wilson's final work. -
Wilson diagnosed with cancer
August Wilson on June 2005 was diagnosed with terminal liver cancer and was sick till.. -
August Wilson has passed away
In June 2005, Wilson was diagnosed with terminal liver cancer. He died Sunday, October 2, 2005, in a Seattle hospital. -