By SHANNON O. WELLS
Growing up in Pittsburgh’s Hill District, future acclaimed playwright August Wilson never drove an automobile. He liked to walk — a lot.
“He never drove, and so everything he did, he walked. And when you walk, you see a lot of stuff that you would miss if you were riding the bus or riding in a car around the neighborhood,” said Wilson biographer Laurence Glasco, professor emeritus in the Dietrich School of Arts & Sciences’ Department of History. “As he walked, he could listen in on conversations.
“He went to nightclubs and bars and restaurants and listened there. He was always just immersed in the daily life.”
The pavement pounding — and intense listening — extended to Wilson’s romantic nights out.
“One of his girlfriends told me how much they walked,” Glasco said. “A date would consist of sauntering up and down the street and taking her to a restaurant.”
Fast forward some years to Wilson’s renowned 1987 play “Fences,” set in 1950s Pittsburgh. It includes a scene where a father and son argue.
“The son asks, ‘How come you don’t like me?’ And the father goes off on him and says, ‘Who says I gotta like you? Listen, I put food on your table, I put clothes on your back, shoes on your feet … That’s my contribution!’” Glasco recounted.
“Well, this girlfriend said they heard that exact conversation coming out of a window on Center Avenue” as they strolled through the Hill District years earlier.
Glasco’s book “August Wilson’s American Century: Life as Art,” published by University of Pittsburgh Press, will be released on Feb. 10. The author said Wilson, in his ability to vividly chronicle life as it actually unfolded, had few peers.
“It was really interesting to see how one of the big strengths of Wilson’s works was how well they do reflect reality,” Glasco said. “He had a photographic memory.”
In “August Wilson’s American Century,” Glasco traces the life, creativity and passions of Wilson, who is widely considered the premier historian of Black life in Pittsburgh. Drawing on Wilson’s early poetry, archival material and original interviews with family members, neighbors and friends, Glasco illustrates “how the city and its residents shaped the playwright and his work,” a Pitt Press description said.
Rather than a theatrical history, Glasco’s book offers what the publisher called a “fulsome biographical look” at August Wilson’s life and how his plays tell the story of Pittsburgh, Black America and “America writ large” in the 20th century.
As a writer and artist, Wilson’s most-acclaimed achievement is a series of 10 plays collectively known as “The Pittsburgh Cycle” or “The Century Cycle,” which dynamically chronicle the heritage and experiences of the 20th century Black community. Along with “Fences,” the series includes “The Piano Lesson” (1990), both winning Wilson the Pulitzer Prize in the Drama category; “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” (1984); and “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone” (1988).
In 2006, Wilson was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame.
“Wilson’s overlapping identities as an outsider, warrior, race man and poet helped him persevere in the face of setbacks, weave real-life observations with his poetry to craft memorable dialogue and compelling characters,” the description said. With this, Wilson portrayed the “realities of race in America in ways that have resonated with theatergoers and readers ever since.”
Taking charge
Glasco, who came to Pitt in 1969, has authored five books, including “August Wilson: Pittsburgh Places in His Life and Plays,” and “Legacy in Bricks and Mortar: African-American Landmarks in Allegheny County.” He started working on Wilson’s biography in 2008, three years after Wilson died of cancer at age 60.
Glasco credits Chris Rawson, professor emeritus in the Department of English, with inspiring the idea.
“I was teaching evening school, and apparently Rawson was too,” he recalled. “After my class let out … he popped in and said, ‘Hey, August Wilson just died. I propose we do a biography on him, a joint biography.’ The idea was that I would concentrate on the biographical material and he’d concentrate on the theatrical material. So we set out to do that.”
Given Rawson’s varied obligations at the time, however, the plan took a turn.
“I still feel bad because he was engaged in a number of projects. Ultimately, I wound up taking over the whole thing,” Glasco said. “But he’s really helped me and helped correct and add material to the book. I want to give him a lot of credit and a lot of thanks.”
Glasco said he not only lacked Rawson’s deep knowledge of August Wilson’s life, he wasn’t even particularly passionate about Wilson’s work.
“I didn’t really appreciate it because I didn’t think his plays had a plot — like the traditional play. It starts out, and then there’s a conflict, and then it builds to a climax, and then there’s the end of the play, and things get resolved. Well, Wilson’s plays aren’t like that,” he said. “So, what is this? It was a new type of type of theater, more modern. ... I was looking for a more traditional theater.”
The further Glasco delved, however, the more he felt he understood what made Wilson’s work special.
“I really enjoyed getting into it once I did, and I talked about this with (Rawson). The more I talked, the more I came to appreciate what Wilson was doing,” he said of a theatrical approach unlike what he’d “been raised on back in my high school days. It was engaging for me.”
Wilson’s personal experience also made a powerful impression on Glasco, who taught Black history in Pittsburgh during his long tenure at the University.
“The story of (Wilson’s) life was fascinating, and nobody had really gone into that sort of detail in terms of how it relates to Pittsburgh,” he said. “To see somebody like Wilson with his plays all set in Pittsburgh and dealing with Pittsburgh themes and topics and personalities was inherently fascinating to me. I enjoyed it, and I learned a lot.”
Eyes wide open
In writing about Wilson, the main challenge Glasco said he faced is one common to personal biography writers: a lack of ample written records.
“You have to rely on interviews with many people,” he said. “It turned out that many of the people I interviewed were fascinating and were fun to talk to and learn from and get their perspective.
“It was a very enjoyable, history sort of thing that I hadn’t really done in my life,” he said. “But it worked out quite well. I was very pleased.”
Glasco said he was particularly struck by Wilson’s loving take on his stomping grounds in the Hill District. Wilson, he noted, found the vibrancy that remained even in the wake of widespread “race riots” in 1968 as well as urban renewal projects that transformed the neighborhood.
“I didn’t realize how dynamic was Black culture in the Hill District following the riots of ‘68. Usually when people talk about Black Pittsburgh, it’s like back in the ‘30s, the ‘40s, maybe the ‘50s,” he noted. “It was a dynamic, vibrant community, which it was. But that all came to an end with the riots of ‘68 that destroyed much of Center Avenue — burned it down.
“I was really surprised at how Wilson was so inspired by what was still there on the Hill and how much survived,” he added, as well as how much life and dynamism survived urban renewal in the late 1950s and early ‘60s. “That was precisely (when) August Wilson came out on the street, in 1965.
“He just found it the most exciting and stimulating place: the shops, the streets were crowded with people, which I had not imagined.”
When Wilson, known for his quietly curious, bookish nature, left home and got his own apartment, Glasco explained, he joined the Black cultural movement. “And he was inspired by what he had to see.”
To the point, according to one Wilson quote, where he went three days without sleeping, “because there was so much going on. He was afraid he’d miss something … That says a lot.”
Glasco likened Wilson to an American version of an 18th century French flâner (pronounced “flanner”) — a guy who went into the working-class neighborhoods of Paris, observing “how average people lived, what they were interested in, what they were singing about,” he explained. “And these guys would write about them.
“(Wilson) was walking the streets of the Hill, observing, listening and getting material for his writings. Just as they were inspired in Paris, he was inspired in Pittsburgh. And to me, it was just a real nice eye-opener.
“You don’t have to go to Paris to get inspired,” Glasco said. “You can find a lot of interesting life, write it right in your own backyard, so to speak, if you take the time to look for it.”
Shannon Wells is a University Times reporter. Reach him at shannonw@pitt.edu.
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