Three Plays by August Wilson. Pittsburgh. 1991. University of Pittsburgh Press. 0822936666. Includes - Fences, Joe Turner's Come And Gone, & Ma Rainey's Black Bottom. Preface by The Playwright. Afterword by Paul Carter Harrison. 318 pages. hardcover. Jacket photograph by Geof Kern. Jacket design by Margot Barbour.  

DESCRIPTION - Frank Rich, chief drama critic for The New York Times, has called playwright August Wilson ‘a major find for the American theater,' a writer of ‘compassion, raucous humor, and penetrating wisdom.' in these three plays - published together for the first time, with a new introduction by the author - the two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize lights a dramatic fuse that winds through three anguished decades of the African-American experience. In MA RAINEY'S BLACK BOTTOM August Wilson depicts an imaginary incident - a 1927 recording session in a run-down Chicago studio - in the career of the legendary blues Singer Ma Rainey. ‘The play is a searing inside account of what white racism does to its victims - and it floats on the same authentic artistry as the blues music it celebrates,' said The New York Times. In FENCES the setting shifts to Pittsburgh in the l950s. Troy Maxson is a garbage collector, an embittered former baseball player in the Negro leagues, and a proud, dominating father. When college athletic recruiters court his teenage son, Troy struggles against his son, his wife, and his own frustrated ambitions. JOE TURNER'S COME AND GONE begins with the arrival of Herald Loomis, his eleven-year-old daughter in tow, at a black Pittsburgh boardinghouse in 1911. The great migration of blacks from the agrarian South to the industrial North has just begun. After seven years of impressed labor on Joe Turner's chain gang, Loomis is looking for the wife he left behind. Each of the plays in this volume has won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. In addition, FENCES won four Tony awards, including best play of the 1986-87 Broadway season, and the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for drama. All three are part of August Wilson's ambitious project to write a play about black Americans in every decade of the twentieth century.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - August Wilson (Frederick August Kittel Jr.; April 27, 1945 – October 2, 2005) was an American playwright. He has been referred to as the "theater's poet of Black America". He is best known for a series of 10 plays, collectively called The Pittsburgh Cycle (or The Century Cycle), which chronicle the experiences and heritage of the African-American community in the 20th century. Plays in the series include Fences (1987) and The Piano Lesson (1990), each of which won Wilson the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, as well as Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (1984) and Joe Turner's Come and Gone (1988). In 2006, Wilson was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame. August Wilson was born in 1945 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and grew up in a two-room apartment behind a grocery store on Bedford Avenue in the city's Hill district. He learned to read at age four. At fifteen he quit high school and began his self-education at the Carnegie Library. At twenty he dedicated himself to writing poetry and supported himself with a series of jobs: dishwasher, short-order cook, porter, toy store stock boy, gardener, and mailroom clerk. At thirty-three he left Pittsburgh for St. Paul, Minnesota, where he turned to play writing. In addition to MA RAINEY'S BLACK BOTTOM, FENCES, and JOE TURNER'S COME AND GONE, August Wilson is the author of THE PIANO LESSON, which won the 1990 Pulitzer Prize for drama, and TWO TRAINS RUNNING.

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