Learn "Fences" By August Wilson
August Wilson was born Frederick August Kittel on April 27, 1945, in Pittsburgh, PA. His white father was not present in his childhood, and Wilson adopted his strong-willed mother's surname when he began to write. When his mother re-married, Wilson moved to a mostly white suburb, and experienced the extent of racism in the school system. After two more schools, he dropped out, and began to self-educate himself at the library. In his twenties, Wilson decided he would be a poet, and had a few poems published in magazines. He also became familiar with and was influenced by the Black Power movement, and with some other poets he founded a theater company that served the Hill District of Pittsburgh. Still focusing primarily on his poetry, Wilson did not begin writing plays seriously until 1978, when he got a job adapting Native American folk tales into children's plays for a museum in St. Paul. Homesick for Pittsburgh, he began to write Jitney , which was first produced in 1982