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August Wilson

Playwright; two Pulitzer Prizes for Drama

United States · 1945–2005

American dramatist best known for a ten-play cycle chronicling twentieth-century African American life, most of it set in the Hill District of Pittsburgh where he grew up. He left school at sixteen and educated himself in the local library. In 1968 he co-founded the Black Horizons Theater in Pittsburgh with Rob Penny.

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Question How has a failure, or apparent failure, set you up for later success? Do you have a favourite failure?

I was writing poetry. But I found the theater such an exciting experience that one day I went home to try. I had one character say to the other guy, “Hey, man, what’s happening.” And the other guy said, “Nothing.” I sat there for twenty minutes and neither of my guys would talk. So 1 said to myself, “Well, that’s all right. After all, I’m a poet. I don’t have to be a playwright. To hell with writing plays. Let other people write plays.” I didn’t try to write a play for a number of years after that first experience.

Recorded Bonnie Lyons and George Plimpton, Interview conducted over lunch at the Sheraton Hotel’s Fourteenth Street Bar, Atlanta, The Paris Review, Issue 153, Winter 1999, 1999 source ↗

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