Conversations with August Wilson
Conversations with August Wilson
In little more than twenty years, playwright August Wilson (1945–2005) completed a ten-play cycle depicting African American life in the twentieth century, with each play taking place in a different decade. Two of the plays—Fences (1987) and The Piano Lesson (1990)—were awarded the Pulitzer Prize, and seven of them received the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for best American play. 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 comments as well on such subjects as the differences between African Americans and whites, his call for more black theater companies, and his belief that African Americans made a mistake in assimilating themselves into the white mainstream. He also talks about his major influences, what he calls his “four B’s”—the blues, writers James Baldwin 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.
Jackson R. Bryer is professor emeritus of English at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is editor of Conversations with Lillian Hellman and Conversations with Thornton Wilder and coeditor of Conversations with Sam Shepard and Conversations with Neil Simon, all published in the University Press of Mississippi’s Literary Conversations Series. Mary C. Hartig is coeditor of Conversations with Sam Shepard (published by University Press of Mississippi) and William Inge: Essays and Reminiscences on the Plays and the Man and coauthor of The Facts on FileCompanion to American Drama.
