In the rehearsal room of August Wilson’s Fences, a long table sits against the wall, covered in a colorful array of books. These books help inform our cast and creative team about August Wilson, as well as the art and places that inspired him. Read those books for yourself!
August Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle: Critical Perspectives on the Plays
By Sandra G Shannon
Providing a detailed study of American playwright August Wilson (1945-2005), this collection of new essays explores the development of the author’s ethos across his twenty-five-year creative career–a process that transformed his life as he retraced the lives of his fellow “Africans in America.” While Wilson’s narratives of Pittsburgh and Chicago are microcosms of black life in America, they also reflect the psychological trauma of his disconnection with his biological father, his impassioned efforts to discover and reconnect with the blues, with Africa and with poet/activist Amiri Baraka, and his love for the vernacular of Pittsburgh.
Pittsburgh Jazz
By John M. Brewer (Jr.)
Pittsburgh Jazz documents the almost forgotten magic created in the city of Pittsburgh, by a host of artists playing in jazz joints that served patrons from a menu packed full of delightful music. The improvised songs, compositions, and unique styles influenced hundreds of musicians who were born and raised in Pittsburgh. And yet, its influence extended across the globe, attracting musicians from around the world to try their luck in the Steel City.
This book connects Pittsburgh style jazz to its bebop roots, and includes photographs captured by Pittsburgh Courier photographers between the 1930s and 1980s.
August Wilson: A Literary Companion
By Mary Ellen Snodgrass
This literary companion provides the reader with a basic overview of Wilson’s major works, including analyses of characters, dates, events, allusions, staging strategies and themes that can be seen across Wilson’s plays. The text opens with an annotated chronology of Wilson’s life and works, followed by his family tree. Each of the 166 encyclopedic entries that make up the book combines insights from a variety of sources, concluding with a selected bibliography on such various subjects as the blues, Malcolm X, irony, and roosters. Two appendices complete the generously cross-referenced work: a timeline of events in Wilson’s life and those of his characters, and a list of 40 topics for projects, composition, and oral analysis.
May All Your Fences Have Gates
Edited by Alan Nadel
This stimulating collection of essays (the first comprehensive critical examination of the work of two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright August Wilson) deals individually five of his major plays. It focuses on the role of history in Wilson’s work, the relationship of African ritual to African American drama, gender relations in the African American community, music and cultural identity, the influence of Romare Bearden’s collages, and the politics of drama.
It includes perspectives from both established Wilson scholars, as well as newer critics who shed a modern light on the work of one of America’s greatest dramatists.
Conversations with August Wilson
Edited by Jackson R. Bryer and Mary C. Hartig
Wilson was indisputably the most significant American playwright to emerge since Edward Albee. Conversations with August Wilson collects a selection of the many interviews Wilson gave from 1984 to 2004. In the interviews, the playwright covers at length and in detail his plays and his background. He also comments on race relations in the American theatre, the need for more black theater companies, and his belief in a uniquely African American drama.
He also talks about his major influences, what he calls his “four B’s”-the blues, writers Jorge Luis Borges and Amiri Baraka, and painter Romare Bearden. Wilson also discusses his writing process and his multiple collaborations with director Lloyd Richards. Throughout, Wilson is candid, expansive, and provocative, displaying in these exchanges his willingness to confront controversial topics just as he did in his plays.
Understanding August Wilson
By Mary L Bogumil
This revised edition of Understanding August Wilson provides a comprehensive view of the thematic structure of Wilson’s plays, the placement of his work within the context of American drama, and the distinctively African American experiences and traditions that he dramatizes.
The Past as Present in the Drama of August Wilson
By Harry J. Elam Jr.
Theater scholar and critic Harry J. Elam examines Wilson’s published plays within the context of contemporary African American literature and in relation to concepts of memory and history, culture and resistance, race and representation. Elam finds that each of Wilson’s plays recaptures narratives lost, ignored, or avoided to create a new experience of the past that questions the historical categories of race and the meanings of blackness.
