A Pitt professor’s new biography chronicles the early life of August Wilson

Laurence Glasco has often walked the streets of Pittsburgh’s historic Hill District neighborhood, both by himself and with students as part of his work exploring and documenting Black life in the city.

The stroll through the winding, cobbled avenues helps Glasco connect with playwright August Wilson, who, before he became a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, also walked the same streets observing and absorbing the stories of the everyday men and women around him.

Now Glasco, professor emeritus in the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences’ Department of History, has written “August Wilson’s American Century: Life As Art,” a biography of the playwright, recently published by the University of Pittsburgh Press.

Other books have been written on Wilson, including the 2023 biography August Wilson: A Life by journalist and theater critic Patti Hartigan. Why another biography in 2026?

“I wanted to write about Wilson’s formative years in Pittsburgh and how they shaped his plays and shaped him,” Glasco says. “Most of what is written about him is about his plays and his life after his success.”

The biography traces the remarkable rise of Wilson. His early life began in a two-room flat where he lived as a child with his mother and siblings in the dilapidated rear of a boarding house, and he eventually became “enshrined in the pantheon of American playwrights” as the first African American man to have a Broadway theater named in his honor, said Glasco.

Through scores of interviews with Wilson and his family and friends as well as years of historical research, Glasco emphasizes just how much the language, the characters, the culture of the Hill shaped Wilson’s life and art — and that perhaps to see a Wilson play is to get a glimpse of the man himself.

Wilson, who died in 2005, was famous for his Century Cycle, a set of 10 plays that chronicle African American life across each decade of the 20th century. Nine of the 10 plays — including “Fences” and “The Piano Lesson,” which were also made into successful films — are set in the Hill District, where Wilson was raised and spent his formative years.

“Wilson’s plays are rooted in his own experience,” Glasco said. “The people and places are more than the artist’s imagination; these are places and people he knew. It is a reality that goes beyond the imagination.”

For part of the decade that Glasco spent writing the biography, he was able to use an unprecedented resource: Wilson’s own archives, which were acquired by the University of Pittsburgh Library System in 2020 from the playwright’s widow, Constanza Romero.

 “He saved a lot,” Glasco explained. “Material like writing notes, but also receipts, letters from friends, sketches. It is an immensely rich body.”

Observing, Glasco said, was at the core of Wilson’s art. He listened and wrote in public places, listened on dates, listened standing by the reference desk at the library. The famous confrontation in the play “Fences” between Troy Maxson and his son, Cory — “Who says I gotta like you?” — was taken practically verbatim from an exchange Wilson overheard, Glasco said.

“Wilson enjoyed listening to people as if it were a hobby,” explained Glasco. “He didn’t drive, so he listened to peoples’ conversations walking down the sidewalk. He thought of himself as a kind of anthropologist. I don’t think there is another book that talks about that aspect of his life.”

“Wilson had a photographic memory,” Glasco said. “He wrote the most accurately captured Black dialogue in any medium — accurate dialogue that is poetry at the same time.”

In fact, said Glasco, Wilson “thought of himself more as a poet than a playwright.”

It’s a literary identity, Glasco discovered, that was influenced by Wilson being an active part of Pittsburgh’s vibrant Black performing arts community. Wilson and his early friends Nick Flournoy, Rob Penny and Chawley P. Williams were part of the Centre Avenue Poets, a group that set out to use poetry to chronicle politics and social life along one of the Hill’s main thoroughfares. Wilson and Penny, who became a Pitt professor, confounded the Black Horizons Theater, which staged plays between 1968 and 1972 that reflected Black consciousness and culture.

The University was a large presence in Wilson’s career, connecting him with other artists to help create Pitt’s Kuntu Repertory Theatre. Wilson’s first play to be produced by a theater company, “Homecoming,” was presented by the Kuntu Theatre in 1975, and Wilson himself directed a Kuntu play in 1977.

Glasco, as a leading historian of Black Pittsburgh, is deeply familiar with the working-class world that shaped Wilson and how he put the Hill District on the world cultural map.

“Harlem was once the iconic image of the urban Black experience,” Glasco said. Now, thanks to Wilson, “the Hill District has become the iconic image of that experience.”

Glasco’s sweep uncovers multiple dimensions of the playwright’s layered life. The historian  identifies four traits in Wilson that he argues characterize some aspect of every male lead in his plays: An outsider who becomes an observer, a warrior who believes life is a battle and takes the punches, a Black nationalist who follows an individual vision encompassing the complexities in life, and a poet whose love for writers Dylan Thomas and John Berryman left him outside the prevailing approach of activist poets like Amiri Baraka in the 1960s and ’70s.

“Life as Art” is part theater history, part collective African American history, but also personal history, too. Glasco’s biography helps readers understand more of the man behind the artist but wants everyone to know, the book is just the beginning to unlocking a figure as complex as Wilson. “With the Pitt archive available,” said Glasco, “mine will not be the last story on August Wilson.”

Photography courtesy of the University Library System Archives and Special Collections