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Introduction; special issue on August Wilson.

Article Excerpt
While the slave narratives, spirituals, blues, and migration narratives record the dispossession and dispersion of African Americans, none bears greater witness than the work of August Wilson. Wilson's plays combine the traditions of the Hill, an African American neighborhood in Pittsburgh, with those of ancient Greece, giving us American kings and queens whose lost heritage haunts their present lives. With a play set in each decade of the twentieth century, Wilson begins with Gem of the Ocean (set in 1904), focusing on how a former Underground Railroad guide and a female Griot established the Hill, and closes with Radio Golf (set in 1997), portraying how white investors underwrote the Hill's gentrification. Produced in 2005, this play features Blacks who collaborate with White investors to steal property that residents of the Hill have inherited from their ancestors (characters in Gem of the Ocean) and demonstrates the detrimental effects of exploitation upon Black communities and individuals.

All of Wilson's plays appeared on Broadway; several won Tony's and other awards; two received the Pulitzer Prize. Writing for a little more than two decades, Wilson created what Frank Rich, the critic for The New York Times, has termed the greatest epic of American theater; Rich and others see Wilson's accomplishment as rivaling, if not exceeding, that of Eugene O'Neill. Like O'Neill, Wilson now has a Broadway theater that bears his name; he is the only African American to be so honored. Certainly the most prominent playwright in the latter part of the twentieth century, he stands alongside giants such as Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams and has joined the ranks of such groundbreaking African American writers as James Baldwin and Toni Morrison. Like them he has transformed his chosen medium.

With the publication of this special issue of College Literature, we hope to reach, and expand, the community of August Wilson scholars and academics. As a playwright of international acclaim, Wilson has already created a large community of theater goers, and his plays offer them a clear vision of what is needed in the world outside the theater. When its members watch, or read, Wilson's decalogue, the audience follows the Hill District and its inhabitants through a century of American life. We see the collapse of a vital world and the way in which various so-called renewals have ultimately destroyed a vibrant and nourishing Black neighborhood and displaced many of its residents.

Certainly this displacement was much on Wilson's mind as he composed his last play. As he made his final revisions in late August of 2005, Wilson told the press...

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