He finished his 10-decade cycle of African American life from 1900 to 2000.
August Wilson, 60, one of America’s greatest playwrights, died overnight in Seattle.
In May, he was diagnosed with liver cancer and in June his doctors determined it was inoperable. But in August he showed that he was indeed prepared, telling the Post-Gazette, “I’ve lived a blessed life. I’m ready.”
The end came overnight when Mr. Wilson died at Swedish Hospital in Seattle, surrounded by his family, said Dena Levitin, Wilson’s personal assistant.
Jeezus. I saw him for the first, and last time at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 2003. What a loss.
This is what Wikipedia has to say about Wilson:
Born Frederick August Kittel in Pittsburgh’s Hill District, one of six children of Frederick Kittel, an immigrant German, and Daisy Wilson, an African-American. He changed his name, to honor his mother, when his father died in 1965. August dropped out of high school, but he made such extensive use of the Carnegie Libray that they later awarded him a degree, the only such one they have awarded. He joined the Army, but left after one year and went on to work odd jobs for a time. Though he left Pittsburgh as a young man, he went on to immortalize the neighborhood in many of his plays.
His most famous plays are Fences (1985) (which won a Pulitzer Prize and a Tony Award), The Piano Lesson (1990) (a Pulitzer Prize and the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award), Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and Joe Turner’s Come and Gone.
The New York Times obituary said,
Each of the plays in the cycle was set in a different decade of the 20th century, and all but “Ma Rainey” took place in the impoverished but vibrant African-American Hill District of Pittsburgh, where Mr. Wilson was born. In 1978, before he had become a successful writer, Mr. Wilson moved to St. Paul, and in 1994 he settled in Seattle, where he died. But his spiritual home remained the rough streets of the Hill District, where as a young man he sat in thrall to the voices of African-American working men and women. Years later, he would discern in their stories, their jokes and their squabbles the raw material for an art that would celebrate the sustaining richness of the black American experience, bruising as it often was.
In his work, Mr. Wilson depicted the struggles of black Americans with uncommon lyrical richness, theatrical density and emotional heft, in plays that gave vivid voices to people on the frayed margins of life: cabdrivers and maids, garbagemen and side men and petty criminals. In bringing to the popular American stage the gritty specifics of the lives of his poor, trouble-plagued and sometimes powerfully embittered black characters, Mr. Wilson also described universal truths about the struggle for dignity, love, security and happiness in the face of often overwhelming obstacles.
The last in his famous cycle was Radio Golf, a play about upper middle-class blacks in the 1990s.
It wasn’t time for him to go yet. It wasn’t. However, Wilson thought that it was:
He also noted that when his long-time friend and producer, Benjamin Mordecai, the only person to work with him on all 10 of his major plays, died this spring, the New York Times obituary included a picture of him and Mordecai together. “That’s what gave God this idea,” he said.
[…]
Even while suffering from cancer and recovering from a small stroke, Mr. Wilson kept re-writing for the play’s second production at Los Angeles’ Mark Taper Forum, July 31-Sept. 18.
