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August Wilson was born in 1945 in Pittsburgh. He began his career as a poet and after many years turned to playwriting. He has said that he is writing "about the stuff that beats in my head." Growing up in a poor section of Pittsburgh, hanging around in bars and pool halls after dropping out of high school because he felt rejected as a black-Wilson's youth was the archetypal black American experience. From the streets he learned a rich, vibrant argot which he has transmuted into powerful, striking dialogue. He plans to write twenty or thirty plays about the black experience in America, decade by decade, and feels he will have no shortage of material: "I've got the four hundred year biography of the black experience in America." August Wilson has won Bush, McKight, Rockefeller, and Guggenheim Foundation Fellowships in playwriting. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fences, which also won four "Tony" Awards, and the Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play. In 1988, Wilson's Fences and Joe Turner's Come and Gone were both running on Broadway. The many awards he has won for his plays indicate the high esteem in which they are held by the critics. He has touched a responsive chord in both blacks and whites in New York and in many regional theatres. His plays have been described as, "haunting, profound, and indescribably moving." Yvonne Shafer has published numerous essays, studies, and reviews in a number of major theatre journals. She, along with Marvin Carlson, is the co-author of a new theatre appreciation text, The Dramatic Mirror, forthcoming from Longman. The author wishes to thank the Yale Repertory Theatre for the photographs.

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