August Wilson, Pittsburgh's Playwright of the Hill
Near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
The building at Seventeen Twenty-Seven Bedford Avenue in Pittsburgh's Hill District is the birthplace of August Wilson, one of the most important American playwrights of the twentieth century. Wilson was born here in nineteen forty-five and grew up in the Hill District neighborhood that would become the landscape of his life's work.
He co-founded the Black Horizon Theater in Pittsburgh and then set out on an audacious project: a cycle of ten plays, one for each decade of the twentieth century, most of them set right here in the Hill District, documenting African American life with a specificity and humanity that American theater had rarely attempted.
Two of those plays won the Pulitzer Prize for drama. Fences, set in the nineteen fifties, won in nineteen eighty-seven. The Piano Lesson, set in the nineteen thirties, won in nineteen ninety. Fences also won the Tony Award for best play on Broadway. Wilson died in two thousand five, just after completing the final play in the cycle. The Pittsburgh streets he walked are the ground every one of those plays stands on.
