Before his death in October 2005, playwright August Wilson completed a 10-play cycle spanning 100 years of African-American life in the 20th century, a play for each decade. Almost all the plays are set in the Hill District of Pittsburgh where Wilson grew up. For the first time, the August Wilson Century Cycle is available as a 10-volume, hardcover, slipcased edition, introduced by The New Yorker’s John Lahr, with forewords written by Laurence Fishburne, Samuel G. Freedman, Tony Kushner, Romulus Linney, Marion McClinton, Toni Morrison, Suzan-Lori Parks, Phylicia Rashad, Ishmael Reed and Frank Rich.
“Art is beholden to the kiln in which the artist was fired. Before I am anything, a man or a playwright, I am an African American,” Wilson wrote before his death. “The cycle of plays that I have been writing since 1979 is my attempt to represent that culture on stage in all its richness and fullness and to demonstrate its ability to sustain us in all areas of human life and endeavor and through profound moments of our history in which the larger society has thought less of us than we have thought of ourselves.”
For more information, visit Theatre Communications Group’s online bookstore or your local bookseller.
