March 1, 2023
Award-winning theater critic and arts reporter Hartigan knew August Wilson, which adds depth to her assessment of the Tony and Pulitzer Prize--honored playwright's life and work. Prepub Alert.
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Copyright 2023 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
June 15, 2023
The life of an acclaimed American playwright. Theater critic and arts reporter Hartigan makes an impressive book debut with an appreciative, well-researched biography of August Wilson (1945-2005), winner of multiple awards (including Pulitzers for Fences and The Piano Lesson and a Tony for Fences) for his plays about Black experiences in 20th-century America. Wilson grew up in Pittsburgh, the son of a single mother who had many children with married European baker Frederick August Kittel. The eldest, Frederick August Kittel Jr.--he changed his name as an adult--was an intellectually precocious child, bored in school, a loner who was often bullied. When a high school teacher refused to believe that he wrote an excellent paper, Wilson stopped going to classes, spending his days reading at the Carnegie Library. The incident, Hartigan writes, "was more than just a failure of an adult to encourage a singular achievement. It was a defining moment that would color his interactions as an artist later in life." The author chronicles Wilson's early financial and artistic struggles as a poet and playwright and the growing recognition of his talent: in Minneapolis, where he won a Playwrights' Center fellowship, and at the Eugene O'Neill National Playwrights Conference, where he proved to be a startling success. In 1982, New York Times theater critic Frank Rich gave his new play a rave review. The connections he made there, notably with Lloyd Richards, the artistic director, shaped his "meteoric rise to success." By the 1980s, Wilson was famous, constantly crisscrossing the country to oversee the productions of several plays. Travel, though, and serial womanizing caused the end of his second marriage; his first was short-lived and produced a daughter; his third wife survived him. Hartigan portrays Wilson as ambitious, stubborn, and self-absorbed, "fiercely protective of his work, passionately attached to every word." An authoritative portrait of a defiant champion of Black theater.
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Starred review from July 17, 2023
Boston Globe journalist Hartigan debuts with an engrossing biography of playwright August Wilson (1945–2005). Writing from what he termed “the blood’s memory,” Wilson “depicted the ordinary lives of honorable people whose stories were ignored by mainstream culture,” particularly working-class Black people in Pittsburgh, where he has born and raised. Hartigan details how Wilson triumphed over a hardscrabble childhood to launch his landmark 10-play cycle on Black life in 20th-century America, starting with Jitney! in 1979 and reaching Broadway in 1983 with Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. He achieved his greatest success with 1987’s Fences, which “memorably a Black family to life on Broadway in a way that hadn’t been achieved since Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun,” though Hartigan notes the play is also Wilson’s most “conventional,” with characters “planted firmly in the soil of Pittsburgh in 1957”; later works were imbued by a “deep mysticism” and populated with “characters... haunted by four hundred years of bloody history.” Drawing on original interviews with the playwright, Hartigan meticulously renders Wilson’s often contentious relationships with collaborators and actors; his painstaking “rewrite and refine” process; and the complexities and limitations of his legacy—he “never asked to be ‘the Black artistic spokesperson,’... he wrote what he knew, which is precisely what he told other writers to do.” This will serve as the definitive account of an essential American playwright.
Starred review from July 1, 2023
There probably won't be a better-written biography of the great playwright August Wilson (1945-2005) than theater critic Hartigan's remarkable book. Wilson wrote a 10-play series--one for each decade of the 20th century--that captures Black lives and their frustrations and hopes. Joe Turner's Come and Gone, Jitney, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, Fences, and The Piano Lesson are just a few of his works that are a permanent part of the American theater repertoire. Wilson won two Pulitzers, two Tony Awards (one posthumously for Best Revival of a Play), and many honorary degrees, including a belated high school diploma; he dropped out at 15 after being accused of plagiarism. Hartigan, an astute judge of the plays, is also insightful and moving as she details how Wilson, whose absent father was white and whose mother was Black, grew up in a predominantly Black neighborhood in a mostly white Pittsburgh suburb. Wilson often said that he didn't do research; he wrote from "the blood's memory." He wasn't a seer, writes Hartigan, but a truth teller, and, more than anyone else, the one who made theatergoers see Black lives as a vibrant part of the soul of the nation. VERDICT This brilliant biography is a vital purchase.--David Keymer
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Starred review from June 1, 2023
"Blood's memory" is what playwright August Wilson identified as his ancestral inspiration. The dramatic language of his characters flow from the history of the African American diaspora, from slavery to emancipation, Jim Crow to the Black power movement. Theater critic Hartigan, who conducted many interviews with Wilson and people who knew him, succeeds in capturing the multilayered complexities of one of America's greatest playwrights--winner of two Pulitzer Prizes and one Tony--through rigorous research and deep knowledge of his work. She constructs the foundations of Wilson's dramatic masterpieces--the 10 plays in the American Century Cycle, set in Pittsburgh, his hometown--in rich detail, mapping the DNA of each play from Jitney (1982) to Radio Golf (2005). Hartigan chronicles Wilson's African American mother's migration north, his tumultuous relationship with his white German immigrant father, the racism he endured, his youthful attempts to find his "song," tenuous first efforts at playwriting on to acclaim on Broadway. For Wilson, work always came first. One collaborator observed, "August was a mythmaker," and while Wilson enjoyed mythologizing his own life, this glowing biography sifts fact from fiction. Wilson was always a poet; his last words to his daughter were, "It is beautiful. It is beautiful." As is this invaluable biography.
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