Editing August Wilson (section)

==Early life==
Wilson was born Frederick August Kittel Jr. in the [[Hill District]] of [[Pittsburgh]], Pennsylvania, the fourth of six children. His father, Frederick August Kittel Sr., was a [[Sudeten Germans|Sudeten German]] immigrant, who was a baker/pastry cook. His mother, Daisy Wilson, was an African-American woman from North Carolina who cleaned homes for a living.<ref Name="NYT">Isherwood, Charles (October 3, 2005), [https://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/03/theater/newsandfeatures/03wilson.html "August Wilson, Theater's Poet of Black America, Is Dead at 60"], ''The New York Times''.</ref> Wilson's anecdotal history reports that his maternal grandmother walked from North Carolina to Pennsylvania in search of a better life. Wilson's mother raised the children alone until he was five in a two-room apartment behind a grocery store at 1727 Bedford Avenue; his father was mostly absent from his childhood. Wilson later wrote under his mother's surname.

The economically depressed neighborhood where he was raised was inhabited predominantly by Black Americans and Jewish and Italian immigrants. Life was tough for the Kittel siblings as they were biracial. August struggled with finding a sense of belonging to a particular culture and did not feel that he truly fit into African-American culture or White culture until later in life. Wilson's mother divorced his father and married David Bedford in the 1950s, and the family moved from the Hill District to the then predominantly White working-class neighborhood of [[Hazelwood (Pittsburgh)|Hazelwood]], where they encountered racial hostility; bricks were thrown through a window at their new home. They were soon forced out of their house and on to their next home.<ref name= "Little 2000">{{cite book|last=Little|first=Johnathan|title=Twentieth-Century American Dramatists: Second Series|year=2000|publisher=Gale|location=[[Detroit|Detroit, Michigan]]|isbn=978-0-7876-3137-6|url-access=registration|url=https://archive.org/details/twentiethcentury228whea_0}}</ref>

The Hill District went on to become the setting of numerous plays in the ''Pittsburgh Cycle''. His experiences growing up there with a strong matriarch shaped the way his plays would be written.<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Shannon |first=Sandra G. |date=1991 |title=The Fences They Build: August Wilson's Depiction of African-American Women |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/44485235 |journal=Obsidian II |volume=6 |issue=2 |pages=1–17 |jstor=44485235 |issn=0888-4412}}</ref>

{{external media | width = 210px | float = right | headerimage= [[File:Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh - IMG 0789.jpg|210px]] | video1 = [http://video.pbs.org/video/2365429059/ American Masters, August Wilson: The Ground on Which I Stand], [[PBS]], 1:24:39<ref name="pbs">{{cite web | title =American Masters, August Wilson: The Ground on Which I Stand| publisher =[[PBS]] | date =February 20, 2012 | url =http://video.pbs.org/video/2365429059/ | access-date =May 29, 2015}}</ref> }}
In 1959, Wilson was one of 14 African-American students at [[Central Catholic High School (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania)|Central Catholic High School]] but dropped out after one year.<ref Name="NYT"/> He then attended Connelley Vocational High School, but found the curriculum unchallenging. He dropped out of Gladstone High School in the 10th grade in 1960 after his teacher accused him of [[plagiarism|plagiarizing]] a 20-page paper he wrote on [[Napoleon I of France]]. Wilson hid his decision from his mother because he did not want to disappoint her. At the age of 16 he began working menial jobs, where he met a wide variety of people on whom some of his later characters were based, such as Sam in ''The Janitor'' (1985).<ref name= "Little 2000" />

Wilson's extensive use of the [[Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh]] resulted in its later awarding him an honorary high school diploma. Wilson, who said he had learned to read at the age of four, began reading Black writers at the library when he was 12 and spent the remainder of his teen years educating himself through the books of [[Ralph Ellison]], [[Richard Wright (author)|Richard Wright]], [[Langston Hughes]], [[Arna Bontemps]], and others.<ref name= "Little 2000" />