3+Biographical+information+on+August+Wilson



= **__August Wilson__**  =

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August Wilson was born in 1945 in Pittsburg Pennsylvania. He wrote about 10 plays which were called The Pittsburg Cycle, in which two of them received the Pulitzer Prices for dramas. Each is set in a different decade, depicting the comic and tragic aspects of the African-American experience in the twentieth century. “The Piano Lesson” and “Fences” were the two that won August Wilson his two prizes. (August Wilson)======

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Wilson's grandmother walked from North Carolina to Pennsylvania in search of a better life. Wilson was born Frederick August Kittel, Jr. in the Hill District of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the fourth of six children, to German immigrant baker, Frederick August Kittel, Sr. and Daisy Wilson, an African American cleaning woman, from North Carolina. Wilson's mother raised the children alone until he was five in a two-room apartment above a grocery store. Wilson's mother divorced and married David Bedford in the 1950s and the family moved from the Hill District to the then predominantly white working class neighborhood of Hazelwood, where they encountered racial hostility; bricks were thrown through a window at their new home. They were soon forced out of their house and on to their next home. (August Wilson)======

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Frederick August Kittel, Jr. changed his name to August Wilson to honor his mother after his father's death in 1965. That same year he discovered the blues as sung by Bessie Smith and bought a stolen typewriter for $10, which he would often pawn when money was tight. At 20 he decided he was a poet and submitted his poetry to such magazines as Harpers. He began to write in bars, the local cigar store and cafes, on table napkins and on longhand yellow note pads, absorbing the voices and characters around him. He liked to write on cafe napkins because, he said, it freed him up and made him less self-conscious as a writer. Wilson stated that he was most influenced by "the four Bs": blues music, the Argentine novelist and poet Jorge Luis Borges, the playwright Amiri Baraka and the painter Romare Bearden. (August Wilson)======

"August Wilson." //http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_Wilson//. //N.p.//, 9 Dec. 2011. Web. 6 Jan. 2012.