August Wilson: 1945-2005

August Wilson, "Theater's Poet of Black America", passed away yesterday after a brief fight with liver cancer. He was 60. Wilson, whom we profiled back in June, was the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright of a ten-piece, decade-by-decade exposition of the twentieth century as experienced by African Americans - from dealing with extraordinary obstacles like race relations, segregation, and the suffrage movement, to the banalities of daily life. Most recently the Pro Arts Collective performed Wilson's "King Hedley II", to nearly universal acclaim.

Tony Kushner, of Angels in America, had this to say of Wilson (from NYTimes):

"He was a giant figure in American theater," the playwright Tony Kushner said yesterday. "Heroic is not a word one uses often without embarrassment to describe a writer or playwright, but the diligence and ferocity of effort behind the creation of his body of work is really an epic story.

"The playwright's voice in American culture is perceived as having been usurped by television and film, but he reasserted the power of drama to describe large social forces, to explore the meaning of an entire people's experience in American history. For all the magic in his plays, he was writing in the grand tradition of Eugene O'Neill and Arthur Miller, the politically engaged, direct, social realist drama. He was reclaiming ground for the theater that most people thought had been abandoned."

Austinist extends our condolences to the family of this extraordinary man. You will be missed, good sir.