Every day brings a new story. And each day contributes to the art of story telling -- in prose and poetry, in music, on the stage, on the screen, and, of course, in books.
Today is the story of April 27th
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It is the 117th day of the year, leaving 248 days remaining in 2022.
Wilson, who was biracial, told the stories of Black Americans in the 20th Century in his Pittsburgh Cycle, 10 plays he wrote that were mostly set in the city's Hill District, the neighborhood in which he was born and raised.
Wilson had a complex home life -- his mother was Black; his father, who was mostly absent, was white, and his stepfather was Black. He grew up in a Black neighborhood, but moved to a white suburb as a teen-ager. His family was the target of racial harassment, and Wilson was falsely accused of plagiarism, which caused him to leave school. He was mostly self-taught by spending his time in the local libraries.
Those experiences were a major theme in his plays. They often showed strong women, and explored the Black cultural experience. "My mother's a very strong, principled woman," he wrote. "My female characters ... come in a large part from my mother." Wilson, who was originally named after his father, took his mother's birth surname as his own.
One of his strengths as a writer was his dialogue, which caught the expressions and dialect of whatever decade he was writing about. Other themes included supernatural experiences -- one character was said to be 248 years old, but whether that was figurative or literal was never explicit -- migration of Black people across the country, the systematic exploitation of Black people, and the question of racial identity,
The plays in his cycle were not a series, as such, nor were they written in order.. Sometimes, though, they had the same character appear at a different stage in life. A previous character might be kin to a new character.
Two of the plays, Fences, and The Piano Lesson, won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in, respectively, 1987 and 1990. Wilson was the co-founder of the Black Horizons Theatre in Pittsburgh. After wilson lived and worked for a decade in St. Paul, Minn., the mayor declared May 27, 1987, as "August Wilson Day."
Wilson died in 2005 in Seatle, Wash.
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