August Wilson: A Life by Patti Hartigan. Simon & Schuster, 2023. 544 pages.
I was deeply inspired by much of what 42-year-old playwright August Wilson said during a talk at the Dramatists Guild in New York City on June 11, 1987. He had already announced his plan to write a ten-play Twentieth Century Cycle, one play for each decade of the African American experience. He said that when he decided to write drama (poetry was his first choice), he made a conscious effort to avoid reading other plays so as not to be influenced by "other voices." He talked about how Blacks, legally prohibited from literacy during slavery and obstructed from it during Jim Crow, established their literary tradition through the blues, a body of work no less powerful, poetic, and enduring than the so-called Western Canon.
In not quite 18 years, Wilson died of liver cancer, but not before he completed the Cycle. All but one of those plays are set in his hometown of Pittsburgh's Hill District (Ma Rainey's Black Bottom takes place in Chicago). Those gifts to American theater earned him two Pulitzer Prizes, a Tony Award, eight New York Drama Critics Circle Awards, two Drama Desk Awards, and numerous other honors.
Having read each of Wilson's ten plays and having seen eight of them (he wrote other plays as well), I was eager to read Patti Hartigan's "unauthorized" biography of the American master, spanning from his great-grandparents in North Carolina to his funeral in 2005. He was hot-tempered, quick to retaliate against a perceived indignity directed toward him, yet he was generous to people who helped him throughout his career. As a playwright and luminary, he refused to mention his white lineage (his father's side), yet his prodigious talent as perhaps the greatest playwright in American history might have led him to explore this conflict for the stage had he lived longer. If he did, such a play would surely be revelatory, moving, and explosive.
Readers interested in a playwright's writing process will not be disappointed by Hartigan's in-depth look at how Wilson approached his craft. She uncovers each play in the Cycle as well as earlier plays when Wilson was cultivating his craft. Her focus on the creation phase through multiple drafts on different regional stages leading to Broadway openings makes the work of this American original simultaneously exciting and excruciating, but ultimately triumphant. This book is a page-turner, a definitive story of a writer who created a new language for the theater, a genius who uncannily presented to the world what he heard on the streets and shops and homes of the Hill District. It's hard to imagine how a future "authorized biography" of Wilson will surpass Hartigan's.
