August Wilson: The Modern Hist
"What we see onstage is life...Slice of life is August Wilson's trademark..." (Gauthier). This statement holds true about all of August Wilson's work. His plays have been the first truly commercially successful works of an African-American playwright since Lorraine Hansberry in 1959 (Lahr 50), but they are not purely entertainment. Wilson's realistic portraits of everyday life and the struggles black Americans face make his works accessible to a wide audience, which has led to his popularity. However, Wilson realized after his first commercial success that his plays were "trying to focus on what [he] felt were the most important issues confronting black Americans for that decade" (Lahr 52). These elements combined make Wilson the first playwright to be commercially successful while accurately depicting 20th-century black America onstage. Though Wilson is of a racially mixed background (his father was a white German immigrant, his mother a black housekeeper from Pittsburgh ("Biography")), "...the culture [he] learned in [his] mother's household was black" (Lahr 50). His father, who was abusive, later abandoned the family when Wilson was 12 years old (Lahr 56). Because of this, his pride towards being a member of the black
It won him his first Pulitzer Prize in 1987 (Lahr 52), and is often touted as his most brilliant play. It's the eternal things in Wilson's dramas--the arguments between fathers and sons, the longing for redemption, the dreams of winning, and the fear of losing--that reach across the footlights and link the black world to the white one. Set in the 1930s, the play's central conflict is the battle over a family piano, which originated from the time when the family was still enslaved. Perhaps the most significant symbol in Fences is that of seeds, flowers, and growth. . In that silence, I could hear the language for the first time. Fences, set in the 1950s, is Wilson's most critically acclaimed work. Eventually, Boy Willie sees things Berniece's way, but not until after a long family battle. Because Wilson combined universal thematic elements with naturalistic language and issues faced by the black population throughout the 20th century, he managed to become the first playwright of the century to both document black America accurately onstage and be commercially successful doing it.
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Acceptance Essays
