Patti Hartigan, a former theater critic for the Boston Globe, has been signed to write the first major biography of August Wilson, the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and one of the most significant voices in 20th-century American literature. 37 INK, an imprint at Atria Books, plans to publish the book, tentatively titled August Wilson: The Kiln in Which He Was Fired, in late 2019.
Hartigan will be working with the full cooperation of Wilson's widow, Constanza Romero, and his estate, which Romero oversees.
Wilson, who died in 2005 at 60, is best known for his 10 plays (known as the "Century Cycle") about black life in Pittsburgh, each set in a different decade of the 20th century. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1987 for Fences, and again in 1990 for The Piano Lesson.
Wilson's work, never far off the radar, has been especially prominent in recent months, with Jitney playing on Broadway and the film version of Fences, starring Denzel Washington and Viola Davis, earning four Oscar nominations. Davis won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar.
In an essay in Spin magazine in 1990, Wilson wrote about his insistence that the film version of Fences have a black director. (It was first optioned in 1987.) Wilson wrote that the job "requires someone who shares the specifics of the culture of black Americans."
Given that view, Hartigan addressed the fact that she is white.
"I interviewed him many times about this subject, and I know how strongly he felt about it," she said. "And I think my knowledge of his work and my experience with him over the years adds a depth to the biography that perhaps someone who isn't immersed in theater wouldn't bring to the project."
She also highlighted the importance of the editorial team behind the book. "It takes a collaboration of editor and author to write a book, and I am honored to be working with Dawn Davis, who has championed multiculturalism in the book world," Hartigan said. Davis, the publisher of 37 INK, previously spent many years running Amistad, the imprint at HarperCollins focused on black literature.
Asked about Wilson's papers, which are in Seattle, Hartigan said that she was eager to see the breadth of material. "There's early poetry, which isn't well known at all," she said. "He took notes everywhere -- on paper plates, napkins -- and they have all of that. Early drafts of plays, plays he wrote but never got produced."
Hartigan first met Wilson in 1987, and wrote about him and his work often. Eight of Wilson's plays were produced at the Huntington Theater Co. in Boston, which was a part of Hartigan's beat, before the works moved to New York. Her lengthy profile of Wilson in the Boston Globe's magazine in 2005 coincided with the premiere of Radio Golf, the last play in his Pittsburgh series.
"I want it to be a legacy biography," Hartigan said of the project, "and a literary biography that shows how the artist can't ever be separate from the art. The life is reflected in the art. I want it to show him as a human being and an artist. But I don't have 2,000 pages."
Style on 03/05/2017