Following the Steps of America’s Shakespeare

Laurence Glasco

Laurence Glasco has often walked the streets of Pittsburgh’s historic Hill District, both by himself and with students as part of his work as the preeminent historian of Black life in the city. The experience helps him connect with playwright August Wilson – sometimes described as the American Shakespeare – who walked the same streets observing the lives around him.

Glasco, associate professor in the Dietrich School’s Department of History, is writing a biography of Wilson. He says Wilson put the Hill District on the world cultural map through his 10 plays that make up the Century Cycle. “Harlem was once the iconic image of the urban Black experience,” Glasco says. “Now the Hill District has become the iconic image of that experience.

“His plays are rooted in his own experience. The people and places are more than the artist’s imagination; these are places and people he knew. It is a reality that goes beyond the imagination,” he says. 

Observing, Glasco explains, was at the core of Wilson’s art. He listened and wrote in public places, listened on dates, listened at the reference desk at the library. The famous confrontation in the play “Fences,” between Troy Maxson and his son Cory—“Who says I gotta like you?”—was taken practically verbatim from an exchange Wilson overheard.

“Wilson had a photographic memory,” Glasco says. “He wrote the most accurately captured Black dialogue in any medium – accurate dialogue that is poetry at the same time. He thought of himself more as a poet than a playwright.”

Glasco identifies four traits in Wilson’s character that characterize every male lead in his plays:  An outsider who becomes an observer, a warrior who believes life is a battle and takes the punches, a Black Nationalist who follows an individual vision encompassing the complexities in life, and a poet whose love for Dylan Thomas and John Berryman left him outside the prevailing approach of activist poets like Amiri Baraka in the 1960s and ‘70s.

Glasco’s biography of Wilson draws on Pitt’s August Wilson Archive. “He saved a lot,” Glasco explains. “Material like writing notes, but also receipts, letters from friends, sketches. It is an immensely rich body. With this archive available, mine will not be the last story on August Wilson.”