Though The Piano Lesson is set decades later, Lymon Jackson’s situation-fleeing Mississippi rather than being forced to work for Stovall to pay off his bail-seems to be a gesture toward this form of injustice. In the second play of the Pittsburgh Cycle, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, Wilson addresses the selling of petty criminals to farmers in need of labor. Historical details in The Piano Lesson highlight matters of structural injustice faced by African Americans in the Depression Era.

At the time of his death from cancer in 2005, he was married to a costume designer named Costanza Romero. Ten of Wilson’s best-known and most critically acclaimed plays formed the Pittsburgh Cycle, with each play focusing on one decade of the African American experience. Eight years later, Fences garnered both a Pulitzer Prize and a Tony Award the following year, The Piano Lesson followed suit with another Pulitzer. Paul, Minnesota in 1978 and began writing plays instead. After some initial efforts at poetry, Wilson moved to St. A few years later, he cofounded the Black Horizon Theater in Pittsburgh. After his father’s death when Wilson was 20, he took the name August Wilson and began writing. He faced prejudice while attending Catholic school, being one of few African American students, and eventually dropped out to study in the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh. Wilson always identified strongly with his mother’s Black heritage and culture. Wilson’s parents divorced while he was young, and he and his five siblings remained with their mother in Pittsburgh, where they lived in predominantly poor Black and Jewish neighborhoods. August Wilson’s mother, Daisy Wilson, was African American woman his father, Frederick Kittel, was of Sudeten German origins (Germans living in what was then Bohemia).

The Piano Lesson by August Wilson