American playwright August Wilson won a Pulitzer Prize for Fences in 1985 and for The Piano Lesson in 1987.

His literary legacy embraces the ten series and received twice for drama for The Pittsburgh Cycle . Each depicted the comic and tragic aspects of the African-American experience, set in different decade of the 20th century.

Daisy Wilson, an African American cleaning woman from North Carolina, in the hill district of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, bore Frederick August Kittel, Junior, the fourth of six children, to Frederick August Kittel, Senior, a German immigrant baker. From North Carolina, maternal grandmother of Wilson earlier sought a better life and walked to Pennsylvania. After his fifth year, his mother raised the children alone in a two-room apartment above a grocery store at 1727 Bedford Avenue.

After death of Frederick August Kittel, Senior, in 1965, his son changed his name to August Wilson to honor his mother.

In 1968, Wilson co-founded the black horizon theater in the hill district of Pittsburgh alongside Rob Penny, his friend. People first performed his Recycling for audiences in small theaters and public housing community centers. Among these early efforts, he revised Jitney more than two decades later as part of his ten-cycle on 20th-century Pittsburgh.

Wilson married three times. His first marriage to Brenda Burton lasted from 1969 to 1972. She bore him Sakina Ansari, a daughter, in 1970.

Vernell Lillie founded of the Kuntu repertory theatre at the University of Pittsburgh in 1974 and, two years later, directed The Homecoming of Wilson in 1976.
Wilson also co-founded the workshop of Kuntu to bring African-Americans together and to assist them in publication and production. Both organizations still act.

Claude Purdy, friend and director, suggested to Wilson to move to Saint Paul, Minnesota, in 1978 and helped him secure a job with educational scripts for the science museum. In 1980, he received a fellowship for the center in Minneapolis. Wilson long associated with the penumbra theatre company, which gave the premieres, of Saint Paul.

In 1981, he married to Judy Oliver, a social worker, and they divorced in 1990.

Wilson received many honorary degrees, including an honorary doctor of humanities from the University of Pittsburgh, where he served as a member of the board of trustees from 1992 until 1995.

Wilson got a best known Tony award and the New York circle of drama critics; he authored Ma Rainey's Black Bottom , and Joe Turner's Come and Gone .

In 1994, Wilson left Saint Paul and developed a relationship with Seattle repertory theatre. Ultimately, only Seattle repertory theater in the country produced all works in his ten-cycle and his one-man show How I Learned What I Learned .

Constanza Romero, his costume designer and third wife from 1994, bore Azula Carmen, his second daughter.

In 2005, August Wilson received the Anisfield-Wolf lifetime achievement award.

Wilson reported diagnosis with liver cancer in June 2005 with three to five months to live. He passed away at Swedish medical center in Seattle, and people interred his body at Greenwood cemetery, Pittsburgh on 8 October 2005.