Wilson, August

Wilson, August (1945– ), major American playwright, son of a White father and a Black mother, who identifies wholly as Black and writes about the Black experience in America. His Jitney was staged in 1978 by Black Horizons Theatre which he founded himself in 1968. He achieved prominence however with Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (1984; National Theatre, 1989), in which a session in a Chicago recording studio in 1927 by the Black blues singer Ma Rainey and her back-up band is used as a symbol of White exploitation. The setting of Fences (1987; London, 1990), which won the Pulitzer Prize, is a run-down house in Pittsburgh (Wilson's home town), the action covering 1957–65. The leading character, played originally by James Earl Jones, is a Black former baseball player, prevented by racial prejudice from gaining the recognition he deserves, who works as a garbage collector and vents his frustration on his family. Joe Turner's Come and Gone (1988; London, 1990) is set in 1911 in a Pittsburgh boarding-house used by Blacks in transit from the South. In 1990 Wilson won a second Pulitzer Prize for The Piano Lesson, set in 1936, about a family dispute over a piano. He intends eventually to write a play set in each decade of the 20th century. He is also a poet.