Introduction; Special Issue on August Wilson

While the slave narratives, spirituals, blues, and migration narratives record the dispossession and dispersion of African Americans, none bears greater witness than the work of August Wilson. Wilson's plays combine the traditions of the Hill, an African American neighborhood in Pittsburgh, with those of ancient Greece, giving us American kings and queens whose lost heritage haunts their present lives. With a play set in each decade of the twentieth century, Wilson begins with Gem of the Ocean (set in 1904), focusing on how a former Underground Railroad guide and a female Griot established the Hill, and closes with Radio Golf (set in 1997), portraying how white investors underwrote the Hill's gentrification. Produced in 2005, this play features Blacks who collaborate with White investors to steal property that residents of the Hill have inherited from their ancestors (characters in Gem of the Ocean) and demonstrates the detrimental effects of exploitation upon Black communities and individuals.

All of Wilson's plays appeared on Broadway; several won Tony's and other awards; two received the Pulitzer Prize. Writing for a little more than two decades, Wilson created what Frank Rich, the critic for The New York Times, has termed the greatest epic of American theater; Rich and others see Wilson's accomplishment as rivaling, if not exceeding, that of Eugene O'Neill. Like O'Neill, Wilson now has a Broadway theater that bears his name; he is the only African American to be so honored. Certainly the most prominent playwright in the latter part of the twentieth century, he stands alongside giants such as Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams and has joined the ranks of such groundbreaking African American writers as James Baldwin and Toni Morrison. Like them he has transformed his chosen medium.

With the publication of this special issue of College Literature, we hope to reach, and expand, the community of August Wilson scholars and academics. As a playwright of international acclaim, Wilson has already created a large community of theater goers, and his plays offer them a clear vision of what is needed in the world outside the theater. When its members watch, or read, Wilson's decalogue, the audience follows the Hill District and its inhabitants through a century of American life. We see the collapse of a vital world and the way in which various so-called renewals have ultimately destroyed a vibrant and nourishing Black neighborhood and displaced many of its residents.

Certainly this displacement was much on Wilson's mind as he composed his last play. As he made his final revisions in late August of 2005, Wilson told the press that he was suffering from advanced liver cancer, and he died on October 2. His body of work captures the intersections of race, class, community, and African American cultural identity from 1904 to 1997. Like William Faulkner's "small postage stamp of humanity" (his phrase for his invented Yoknapatawpha County), Wilson's community also reenacts human sorrow, shame, and triumph in historicized, local settings, in the public, communal arena of the stage.

Wilson offers us a unique, deliberately shaped body of work that merits both detailed readings that focus on a single play and holistic approaches that consider the entirety of his oeuvre. Wilson's multidimensionality is rooted in part in a phenomenon described by Sam Tanenhaus and others: the most important period in the formation of adult values is the 20s when people come of age and gain their mature perspective on public events (Tanenhaus 2008). For Wilson, that period was the 1960s, and the upheaval of those years affected him deeply; when engaging with his works set in other decades, readers and viewers are frequently aware that they are looking at events from a 60s perspective. As Sandra Shannon, Harry Elam, Jr., and others have pointed out, Wilson made decisions based upon his belief in the aesthetic and political principles of the Black Arts and Black Power movements, the prevailing artistic, cultural, and nationalist movements of the 1960s.

The period in which Wilson wrote the plays also provides another important perspective. For example, with...