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August Wilson was born Fredrick August Kittle on April 27, 1945. His parents were Frederick Kittel, a German immigrant, and Daisy Wilson, an African woman woman. The playwright never saw much of his father growing up. He was mostly raised by his mother, in an apartment with no hot water, at Pittsburgh's Hill District, a largely black neighborhood.

When he was 20, August Kittle formally became August Wilson. He ditched his absent father's name altogether, aligning himself with his mother, her loved ones, and her own culture.

Wilson confronted lots of racial discrimination in college. He'd written an excellent twenty-page paper on Napoleon. His teacher didn't believe that a black person could write so well and called him a cheater. When the primary backed up her, Wilson dropped out of school. He continued to educate himself in the Pittsburgh Public Library. It looks like he did a very good job of it, too: he swiftly became one of the greatest American playwrights of all time.

Though Wilson began his writing career as a poet, he was attracted to the theatre. Along with his buddy Rob Penny, he established Black Horizons theatre business in Pittsburgh. Later on, Wilson's play Jitney got him accepted to the Playwright's Center in Minneapolis. It was there that he first started to think of himself as a playwright instead of a poet.

A couple of years later he found himself in the O'Neill Playwrights Conference with his play Ma Rainey's Black Bottom. There he met the director Lloyd Richards, an African American man who just so happened to be dean of Yale's Drama School as well as artistic director of the highly influential Yale Repertory Theatre. Richards premiered many of Wilson's plays at Yale Rep and also led his first six plays on Broadway.

August Wilson is most famous for his ten-play cycle which chronicles the African American expertise in the 20th century. This set of plays is sometimes known as the Pittsburgh Cycle, since all but one (Ma Rainey's Black Bottom) is set in Wilson's hometown. The bicycle is broadly considered to be one of the most significant contributions to American drama. Its plays have won just about every award a play can win, including eight New York Drama Critics' Circle awards, a Tony award for Best Play, and also two Pulitzer Prizes.

What's amazing is that when the play first came to Broadway, Wilson's Joe Turner's Come and Gone was already playing there. This made Wilson the initial black playwright to have more than one play on Broadway in the same time.

Fences was an all-out hit and is widely considered to be Wilson's largest commercial success. It premiered at Yale Rep under the direction of Lloyd Richards and starred James Earl Jones as the profoundly flawed Troy Maxson. Besides the Pulitzer Prize, the play won tons of Tonys and Drama Desk Awards.

Some state that Troy Maxson may be based on David Bedford, Wilson's stepfather. Bedford had lots of similarities to Troy, like the fact that he was once a talented athlete and had spent time in prison for murder. It has also been said that Rose may be based on Wilson's mother Daisy. See the flower names? Hmm. Wherever the play came from, its successful Broadway run cemented Wilson's reputation. It proved he can play in the big leagues. Though he died too early -- of liver cancer at the age of 60 -- he has taken his place among the greats of American playwriting.

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