August Wilson
August Wilson
August Wilsonwas an American playwright whose work included a series of ten plays, The Pittsburgh Cycle, for which he received two Pulitzer Prizes for Drama. Each is set in a different decade, depicting the comic and tragic aspects of the African-American experience in the 20th century...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPlaywright
Date of Birth27 April 1945
CityPittsburgh, PA
CountryUnited States of America
writing awards focus
Between speeches and awards, you can find something to do every other week. It's hard to write. Your focus gets splintered. Once you put one thing in your calendar, that month is gone.
heavy shoulders
Freedom is heavy. You got to put your shoulder to freedom. Put your shoulder to it and hope your back holds up.
book needs
All you need is the blues. To me, the blues is the book, it's the bible, it's everything.
mean writing play
The impulse to write the poem, that impulse is a great dramatic impulse. But hell, anybody could write a play. I do know this: all writers are not dramatists. You may be a great writer, but that doesn't necessarily mean you're a dramatist. Very few people have done both.
attitude character play
Blues is the bedrock of everything I do. All the characters in my plays, their ideas and their attitudes, the stance that they adopt in the world, are all ideas and attitudes that are expressed in the blues.
generate mental running
We are running out of energy, mental energy, ... We need to generate something new, for ourselves.
definitely needed order refuge
Writing has definitely been a refuge for me, something I needed to do in order to survive.
came decided dollar magazine next paid putting seemed sent stopped wrote
It was early on in 1965 when I wrote some of my first poems. I sent a poem to 'Harper's' magazine because they paid a dollar a line. I had an eighteen-line poem, and just as I was putting it into the envelope, I stopped and decided to make it a thirty-six-line poem. It seemed like the poem came back the next day: no letter, nothing.
best blues plays private rewriting says singer streets walked wrote
I once wrote a short story called 'The Best Blues Singer in the World,' and it went like this: 'The streets that Balboa walked were his own private ocean, and Balboa was drowning.' End of story. That says it all. Nothing else to say. I've been rewriting that same story over and over again. All my plays are rewriting that same story.
audience bear drew fascinated gather people theater virtues willingly
I think it was the ability of the theater to communicate ideas and extol virtues that drew me to it. And also, I was, and remain, fascinated by the idea of an audience as a community of people who gather willingly to bear witness.
cattle former good poems series stage suggested turn wrote
In 1977, I wrote a series of poems about a character, Black Bart, a former cattle rustler-turned-alchemist. A good friend, Claude Purdy, who is a stage director, suggested I turn the poems into a play.
eleven fear last left niro picked scorsese
I'm a De Niro fan. I went eleven years without seeing a movie; the last one before that, February 1980, was De Niro and Scorsese in 'Raging Bull,' and when I went back, it was 'Cape Fear,' with De Niro and Scorsese. I picked up right where I left off at.
fascinated hugo napoleon power submitted teacher title victor written
I had always been fascinated with Napoleon because he was a self-made emperor; Victor Hugo said, 'Napoleon's will to power,' and it was the title of my paper. And I submitted it to my teacher, and he didn't think I had written it. And he wanted me to explain it to him.
fullness learned life rendered richness
From Romare Bearden I learned that the fullness and richness of everyday life can be rendered without compromise or sentimentality.