Del Norte Public Library

A play that deals with the effect that an unexpected, large sum of money has on a poor Black family living on the South Side of Chicago.

Presents biographical sketches of fourteen notable African Americans, including Martin Luther King, Jr., Rose Parks, and "Satchel" Paige, accompanied by brief skits in which readers can act out imagined scenes from their lives.

Born a slave, young Frederick Douglass endures many years of cruelty before escaping to the North to claim his freedom.

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);...

"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....