August Wilson’s real name is Fredrick August Kittel, and...

August Wilson’s real name is Fredrick August Kittel, and he was born on April 27, 1945. His father was a white German immigrant baker. Wilson was the fourth of six children that lived with their mother in Pittsburgh. His father hardly ever visited them, their mother raised them alone. Their mother was a cleaning woman, but her work did not make enough to bring the children out of poverty. When he was in high school he dropped out because of a racist problem that happened there. So far he has had three marriages. His plays usually show the exclusion of African Americans from history (Shannon 16). He has many ways of writing stories, but his themes explore and communicate the black experience in a way which seems particular to blacks but†¦show more content†¦At Pittsburgh’s Halfway Art Gallery he found his audience for poetry, and got to meet some of Pittsburgh’s black literati. In 1981, Wilson submitted Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, and it was accepted in the O’Neill Center. It did however, undergo many changes in the summer of 1982, it went on to play at Yale and became the first Broadway play in 1984. His next play that he wrote was Fences. Now Fences is a interesting play to read, because reading the background information I feel as if he was writing this book from his point of view. His dad was not always there, his dad cheated on his mom, his mom raised the kids, and his dad was a worker and then came home and never messed with the kids or played with them. Not so much as he treated the kids like slaves, but in a way you could say he did. Reading the play and then writing this paper has been a wonderful experience. Reading the play gives us some back ground information about what the â€Å"1980s† were about. The racism, the abandonment, the shame, the cheating, we see it all in this play. Wilson did a good job at showing us what it was like to be a boy in this time when you wanted to play baseball but could not because you were black, or wanted to go somewhere and you could not because you were black. Some people would think that only â€Å"blacks† would like to read something like this because they would â€Å"understand† it, but that is not true. Reading Wilson’s