AUGUST WILSON

The life of an acclaimed American playwright.

Theater critic and arts reporter Hartigan makes an impressive book debut with an appreciative, well-researched biography of August Wilson (1945-2005), winner of multiple awards (including Pulitzers for Fences and The Piano Lesson and a Tony for Fences) for his plays about Black experiences in 20th-century America. Wilson grew up in Pittsburgh, the son of a single mother who had many children with married European baker Frederick August Kittel. The eldest, Frederick August Kittel Jr.—he changed his name as an adult—was an intellectually precocious child, bored in school, a loner who was often bullied. When a high school teacher refused to believe that he wrote an excellent paper, Wilson stopped going to classes, spending his days reading at the Carnegie Library. The incident, Hartigan writes, “was more than just a failure of an adult to encourage a singular achievement. It was a defining moment that would color his interactions as an artist later in life.” The author chronicles Wilson’s early financial and artistic struggles as a poet and playwright and the growing recognition of his talent: in Minneapolis, where he won a Playwrights’ Center fellowship, and at the Eugene O’Neill National Playwrights Conference, where he proved to be a startling success. In 1982, New York Times theater critic Frank Rich gave his new play a rave review. The connections he made there, notably with Lloyd Richards, the artistic director, shaped his “meteoric rise to success.” By the 1980s, Wilson was famous, constantly crisscrossing the country to oversee the productions of several plays. Travel, though, and serial womanizing caused the end of his second marriage; his first was short-lived and produced a daughter; his third wife survived him. Hartigan portrays Wilson as ambitious, stubborn, and self-absorbed, “fiercely protective of his work, passionately attached to every word.”

An authoritative portrait of a defiant champion of Black theater.