August Wilson
Author
Description
It is the spring of 1948. In the still cool evenings of Pittsburgh's Hill district, familiar sounds fill the air. A rooster crows. Screen doors slam. The laughter of friends gathered for a backyard card game rises just above the wail of a mother who has lost her son. And there's the sound of the blues, played and sung by young men and women with little more than a guitar in their hands and a dream in their hearts. August Wilson's Seven Guitars is...
4) Jitney: 1977
Author
Series
Pub. Date
2007
Description
Wilson's plays form a kind of fever chart of the unmooring trauma of slavery. Their historical trajectory takes African-Americans through the shock of freedom at the turn of the century (Gem of the Ocean); to the reassembling of identity in the teens (Joe Turner's Come and Gone); the struggle for power in the urban America in the twenties (Ma Rainey's Black Bottom); the dilemma of embracing their past as slaves in the thirties (The Piano Lesson);...
Author
Series
Pub. Date
2007
Description
Wilson's plays form a kind of fever chart of the unmooring trauma of slavery. Their historical trajectory takes African-Americans through the shock of freedom at the turn of the century (Gem of the Ocean); to the reassembling of identity in the teens (Joe Turner's Come and Gone); the struggle for power in the urban America in the twenties (Ma Rainey's Black Bottom); the dilemma of embracing their past as slaves in the thirties (The Piano Lesson);...
Author
Series
Pub. Date
2007
Description
Wilson's plays form a kind of fever chart of the unmooring trauma of slavery. Their historical trajectory takes African-Americans through the shock of freedom at the turn of the century (Gem of the Ocean); to the reassembling of identity in the teens (Joe Turner's Come and Gone); the struggle for power in the urban America in the twenties (Ma Rainey's Black Bottom); the dilemma of embracing their past as slaves in the thirties (The Piano Lesson);...
Author
Series
Pub. Date
2007
Description
"August Wilson liked to say that his plays were "fat with substance." And he was right: his ten-play cycle - Wilson wrote one for every roiling decade of the African-American experience in the twentieth century - transforms historical tragedy into imaginative triumph. The blues are catastrophe expressed lyrically; so are Wilson's plays, which swing with the pulse of the African-American people, as they moved, over the decades, from property to personhood....
Author
Series
Pub. Date
2007
Description
Wilson's plays form a kind of fever chart of the unmooring trauma of slavery. Their historical trajectory takes African-Americans through the shock of freedom at the turn of the century (Gem of the Ocean); to the reassembling of identity in the teens (Joe Turner's Come and Gone); the struggle for power in the urban America in the twenties (Ma Rainey's Black Bottom); the dilemma of embracing their past as slaves in the thirties (The Piano Lesson);...
Author
Pub. Date
2007
Description
Wilson's plays form a kind of fever chart of the unmooring trauma of slavery. Their historical trajectory takes African-Americans through the shock of freedom at the turn of the century (Gem of the Ocean); to the reassembling of identity in the teens (Joe Turner's Come and Gone); the struggle for power in the urban America in the twenties (Ma Rainey's Black Bottom); the dilemma of embracing their past as slaves in the thirties (The Piano Lesson);...
Author
Pub. Date
2006
Description
Set in 1904 Pittsburgh, it is chronologically the first work in August Wilson's decade-by-decade cycle dramatizing the African American experience during the 20th century-an unprecedented series that includes the Pulitzer Prize-winning plays Fences and The Piano Lesson. Aunt Esther, the drama's 287-year-old fiery matriarch, welcomes into her Hill District home Solly Two Kings, who was born into slavery and scouted for the Union Army, and Citizen Barlow,...
14) The Piano Lesson
Author
Pub. Date
2002, c1995
Description
Boy Willie wants to buy a farm that his ancestors used to work as slaves, but first he must sell the family's most valued possession, a beautifully carved piano that holds a unique place in their history. He tries everything to persuade his sister to let it go, but she refuses. To her, the heirloom symbolizes the heart and soul of the family.
15) Fences
Author
Pub. Date
[2017]
Description
In 1950s Pittsburgh, a former Negro League baseball player struggles to provide for his family.
16) Fences
Pub. Date
[2017]
Description
In 1950s Pittsburgh, a Black garbage collector named Troy Maxson--bitter that baseball's color barrier was only broken after his own heyday in the Negro Leagues--is prone to taking out his frustrations on his loved ones.