Patti Hartigan’s comprehensive August Wilson: A Life is the first biography of the playwright (1945–2005), who seems to have been simultaneously the quirkiest and most ordinary guy (as if in alternating paragraphs, and not unlike many of his characters)—a mysterious artist who conjured the Hill District of Pittsburgh into a layered, coherent myth even as he obsessed over current events. Hartigan admires Wilson and seems to understand him intuitively while finding vantage points for measured, relevant critiques. She has created a balanced portrait of a man who liked to write (and/or talk and/or chain-smoke) in diners and coffee shops late into the night, made many human mistakes, and transmuted the communities he knew into an enduring contribution to literature and the performing arts.
Hartigan is a former theater critic of The Boston Globe who interviewed Wilson several times over the years, including extensively for a profile in 2005. The Huntington Theatre in Boston staged several of Wilson’s plays en route to Broadway (along with the Yale Repertory Theatre and others), so she was present at key moments in his career. It is surprising that no professor of English, African American studies, or theater studies has ever written (in the eighteen years since Wilson’s death) a biography of arguably the most famous and successful American playwright of the last quarter of the twentieth century.
Yet Hartigan’s professional background is ideal for the task—she knows the theater business and the review business (far more important to a play than to a book or movie) and saw the plays as they appeared. On the premiere of Wilson’s masterpiece Joe Turner’s Come and Gone (1984) at the Huntington Theatre in 1986, Hartigan writes that
Boston, with all its universities, boasts a sophisticated audience, and many in the house that night were stunned and mesmerized by the bones scene that ends Act I, when the juba ends and Loomis falls into a paroxysm of tremors.
(She notes that Wilson said if he had never written anything else, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone would have been enough.) But Hartigan does not overdo it with her own reviews or eyewitness reportage. She appropriately quotes from the make-or-break reviews (e.g., Frank Rich’s in The New York Times).
Wilson’s story is about as unlikely as could be imagined. A natural autodidact who did not care for school, he briefly served in the army (of which no records survive) and then lived in Los Angeles before returning to Pittsburgh in 1963. There he was involved in the local poetry scene until he moved to St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1978 to write children’s plays about dinosaurs for a museum—hardly an obvious move for an aspiring playwright at that (or any) time. He claimed he did not attend a professionally produced play until he was thirty-one.
Yet less than a decade later, Wilson won the Pulitzer for Fences, which made a 1,000 percent profit for its Broadway producers over 525 performances, becoming (according to Hartigan) the most successful drama of all time. There were considerable artistic disagreements about Fences backstage (so to speak) involving formidable personalities (Lloyd Richards, James Earl Jones) and pressure on Wilson to change the ending, which he refused to do. Hartigan’s narration of this material is riveting; she is especially skilled at relaying such tangled history. She also documents Wilson’s artistic struggles, such as the difficulty of crafting a play with a strong central character (Fences, 1985) and of writing believable, multidimensional women dealing with serious problems (Tonya in King Hedley II, 1999). No fan or scholar of Wilson’s work should dream of skipping this book.
The book is not authorized by the Wilson estate, which means that “Wilson’s intimate letters and early plays and poetry are paraphrased.” Nevertheless, Hartigan seems to have had access to Wilson’s calendars or appointment books and much other private material, such as contracts. She is meticulous and thorough on the years Wilson was a public figure, roughly 1982–2005. Her account of this period takes up 80 percent of the book and is surely definitive.
Where the historical record is less robust, the story feels a little spotty, mythic, and anecdotal, such as in early chapters about Wilson’s ancestors on his mother’s side, from North Carolina. Hartigan has even less information on his father, Frederick Kittel, a white man from Germany who had served in the U.S. Army in World War I, with whom his mother, Daisy, and the family in general had a rocky relationship, yet who left $659.01 to each of his children when he died in 1965. Wilson was born Frederick August Kittel, was called Freddy in his youth, and started going by the name August Wilson soon after his father died. He changed it legally in 1981. His siblings kept the Kittel name.
Hartigan conducted extensive interviews with friends, family, actors, and directors and has an eye for little details that serve to expand Wilson’s dimensions. James Yoshimura recalls that it was on the day of Wilson’s second wedding that Wilson asked him to be his best man; Wilson, Oscar Hijuelos, Lou Reed, and “an hvac technician” would gather to watch boxing in New York at Hijuelos’s place; Wilson befriended an eccentric street-haranguer in Seattle, and when the old-timer died, Wilson looked into paying his debts—yet he turned out to be solvent. The book abounds in such gems.
The major professional tensions in Wilson’s life also receive detailed analysis, such as the falling-out with his mentor Lloyd Richards and the feud with his long-running antagonist Robert Brustein, which culminated (and fizzled) in their famous debate at New York’s Town Hall Theatre about race and the theater world. This came about after Brustein’s response to Wilson’s headline-grabbing speech at a conference at Princeton that shocked people for its hardline racialism. Hartigan misses or does not mention what I would consider the most astute critique of Wilson’s speech, an uncollected and never reprinted essay by Stanley Crouch in the journal Theater for a roundtable feature called “Beyond the Wilson–Brustein Debate.” Incidentally, Crouch criticizes Wilson for ignoring the dramatic potential in the lives of successful African Americans. Wilson’s Radio Golf (2005) may have been written partially in response.
Hartigan is refreshingly candid at times and unafraid to make difficult points. She bluntly calls the 2020 Netflix adaptation of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (1982) “flawed.” While working on King Hedley II, his play set in the 1980s, Wilson did not understand hip-hop and could not find the time to learn about it, so he decided it was an extension of the blues (maybe a little, but not really). Hartigan does not shy away from problems such as Wilson’s unthinking slander of two respectable local businesses in Two Trains Running (1990), West Funeral Home and Lutz’s Meat Market:
In Two Trains, Lutz refuses to give Hambone his ham as payment for a job well done. But in real life, Karl Lutz, who was white, was a beloved fixture in the Hill community, and most of his employees were Black, which was rare for white-owned businesses in the area at the time. His prices were fair; his meat was high-quality. But again, Wilson just picked the name; he was not writing about that particular business owner. The nitpicking frustrated him. “I never consciously modeled a character after anyone,” he said.
Wilson was not trying to critique either business; he simply did not feel like changing the names. But he created real sorrow and distress for real people, such as Thomasina L. West of the funeral home family—distress, moreover, that he dismissed. Why would someone with such a singular and special imagination not employ it on the simplest details?
Hartigan deals frankly with Wilson’s extramarital affairs in his first marriage and reports of his short and explosive temper. I was most surprised to read about Wilson’s apparent problem with coat-check workers. This hang-up (sorry) was witnessed by many. I was reminded of Elisabeth Sifton’s reminiscence of Saul Bellow, published in Slate in 2005: “We wondered what ancient injuries required this generous, wise person to turn skittishly mean.” Yet Wilson was a lavish tipper in restaurants, Hartigan reports, and a beloved customer at his favorite coffee shop in Seattle, where he lived after 1990. He also seems to have been a superb father to his two daughters.
Aside from Wilson, Hartigan admires many in his orbit, and it is often a pleasure when the actor Anthony Chisholm (1943–2020) pops up in the book. Another backstage page-turner is the story of how Wilson’s penultimate play, Gem of the Ocean (2003), made it to Broadway (barely) in 2004. Amid doubts by the backers about the play’s viability, a question arose over who would play Solly Two Kings, the ornery yet funny former Underground Railroad conductor (who named himself after King David and King Solomon) eking out a meager existence in 1904 but still in possession of the adventurous spirit of his youth. Would it be Chisholm, a Wilson regular who originated the role in regional theaters, or Delroy Lindo, who played Herald Loomis in Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, and who the producers felt was a bigger star? Lindo got the part initially (with Chisholm relegated to the lesser role of Eli), but his vision for the character was too much at odds with that of Wilson and others, and the memorable role (which helped generate great reviews for the Broadway production) went back to Chisholm:
Chisholm was in place, ready to start, when Wilson bounded onto the stage, carrying Solly Two Kings’s walking stick. “He stuck it in my chest and started crying like a baby. I am telling the God’s truth. He said, ‘Forgive me, man. Forgive me for taking your role.’ I had to peel him off me. I said, ‘Come on, man. Any role you write is a piece of fruit on the tree.’”
Hartigan seems especially fond of Chisholm, who grew up in Cleveland during the years Wilson was growing up in Pittsburch and who often took cigarette breaks with him during rehearsals. He is quoted many times, often as saying something poetic and insightful. If she did enough interviews with Chisholm to produce a book or article, it would be a tribute to a fine actor who had a knack for bringing Wilson’s characters to life.
Wilson died at sixty and would be seventy-eight if he were alive today. What would the author of the prescient Radio Golf (partially about gentrification) have made of Obama and the 2008 crash and tsunami of gentrification that was only getting started when he wrote that play? His stern opposition to color-blind casting was national news in 1997. Would he have come around on the topic, or would he have been appalled by its current ubiquity? Would he have gone viral on TikTok for dressing down a coat-check worker? Would the plays he would have written in his sixties and seventies have removed any doubts about the “American Shakespeare” moniker he often garners?
While there is more work to be done on Wilson’s early life and intellectual development, Hartigan’s treatment of the evolution of the plays and their productions (often seamlessly interlaced with the events of Wilson’s life) as they hopscotched their respective ways from regional theaters to Broadway will be a permanent resource. Wilson’s papers found an institutional home only in 2020, at the University of Pittsburgh, and (having inquired about this for my own research) I can report that the collection remains mostly unprocessed as of late 2023. Welcome and necessary future books will emerge when scholars have had a chance to study this archive, but none of them will be able to avoid or overlook Hartigan’s contribution, not just to Wilson scholarship but to American cultural history.
