dren, as well as students, colleagues, and genera-
tions of readers.
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The Recovery of the Past in Sherley Anne Wil-
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Anne Williams: ‘Some One Sweet Angel Chile’
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———. “(W)riting the Work and Working the Rites.”
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1989): 631–660.
McDowell, Deborah E. “Negotiating between Tenses:
Witnessing Slavery after Freedom—Dessa Rose.”
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Lynda Koolish
Wilson, August (1945–2005)
Although he began writing poetry in his youth,
it is his playwriting that has made August Wilson
a celebrated author. Born in 1945 in Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania, to Frederick and Daisy Kittel, Wil-
son struggled early with family and economic
hardships that would later inform his art. His fa-
ther was white and his mother was African-Ameri-
can, and life as a biracial child in 1940s America
could certainly be troubled. His parents separated
when August was quite young, and his mother
struggled as a cleaning woman to take care of her
six children. Wilson’s stepfather, David Bedford,
became a stronger presence in Wilson’s life than
his father had been. He moved the family to a
predominantly white suburb when Wilson was in
high school, where he was accused of plagiarizing
a paper. Rather than submit to the charges, Wilson
dropped out of school and never graduated.
Wilson worked odd jobs as he worked on his
craft. He also spent a year in the army. When he
began his writing career, he took his middle name,
August, and his mother’s maiden name, Wilson, to
forge his new identity. In Pittsburgh in 1968, he
cofounded the Black Horizons on the Hill Theater
Company with Rob Penny. He also cofounded the
Center Avenue Poets Theater Workshop. In 1969
he married Brenda Barton and in the following
year became the father of Sakina Ansari. By the late
1970s, he focused most of his attention on play-
writing and completed The Homecoming (based
on the life of BLUES singer Blind Lemon Jefferson)
and The Coldest Day of the Year in 1979. His mar-
riage to Barton ended in 1972, and by 1981 Wilson
had remarried a social worker named Judy Oliver.
(Their marriage ended in 1990; he married Con-
stanza Romero, a costume designer, in 1994.)
The first major play, Jitney, appeared in 1982 in
the Allegheny Repertory Theater. A two-act play,
the work was finished in 1979, and the perfor-
mance established Wilson on the stage, but it was
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom that brought Wilson’s
name and his work into the New York theaters.
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom explores the world of
music production in Chicago at the height of the
popularity of swing and jazz. The white ownership
of record companies and the use of underpaid,
black musicians sets the racial and sociocultural
backdrop for the play. The work also serves as an
example of the type of exploitation of African-
American art and talent that often was the bench-
mark of American capitalism. Influenced by the
music of Bessie Smith, the work embraces Wilson’s
infectious love of music that is the cornerstone of
all of his drama. First produced at the Yale Rep-
ertory Company in 1984, under the guidance of
director, Lloyd Richards—who continued to col-
laborate with Wilson—the play appeared in New
York City the same year. It won a Tony nomination
and a New York Drama Critics Circle Award in- Wilson began work on his next play, Fences,
Wilson, August 555