August Wilson

August Wilson — American playwright who turned the Hill District of Pittsburgh into a century-long chorus of Black American life — died in Seattle, Washington, on October 2, 2005. He was sixty. Born Frederick August Kittel Jr. on April 27, 1945, in Pittsburgh, he built the ten-play Pittsburgh Cycle, including Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, Fences, Joe Turner's Come and Gone, and The Piano Lesson, works that treated vernacular speech like scripture and history like a neighbor at the kitchen table. Two Pulitzer Prizes for Drama (1987, 1990) and a Broadway theater renamed in his honor marked the size of the achievement. Diagnosed with liver cancer in 2005, he died at Swedish Medical Center in Seattle and was buried in Pittsburgh. Critics still call him theater's poet of Black America because he refused to thin the music of ordinary talk. Pittsburgh gave him the blocks; Seattle gave him the last quiet. He wrote as if a decade could be a character. He died in Seattle on October 2, 2005. Somewhere a rehearsal room is still arguing about the right beat on a line. Wilson's gift was epic locality — making one neighborhood carry a century. Notice Nearby keeps the death date so October 2 remembers the Pittsburgh playwright who gave America its Century Cycle.