Fences
August Wilson (1985)
“A Black man who was great enough to have been legendary stands in his own backyard building a fence — and doesn't know whether he's keeping something out or something in.”
Fences— Historical Context & Author Background
Author: August Wilson · Published 1985· Era: Contemporary / Pittsburgh Cycle·101 pages
Themes explored: race, american-dream, father-son, legacy, betrayal, duty, masculinity, barriers
About August Wilson
August Wilson (1945-2005) was born Frederick August Kittel in the Hill District of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania — the same neighborhood where Fences is set. His father was a German immigrant baker who was largely absent; his mother, Daisy Wilson, a Black woman who raised six children largely alone, gave him his other surname when she remarried. Wilson dropped out of school at fifteen after a teacher accused him of plagiarizing a paper he had actually written. He educated himself in the library, reading Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, and the blues. He did not set out to write a cycle of plays. He wrote Jitney in 1979, then Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, and only then realized he was writing one play per decade of the 20th century from the perspective of Black American life. Fences, set in the 1950s, was the play that made him famous — it won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the Tony Award for Best Play in 1987, and was revived to equal acclaim in 2010 and again in 2016 (film with Denzel Washington). Wilson died of liver cancer in Seattle in 2005, having completed all ten plays of the Pittsburgh Cycle.
Life → Text Connections
How August Wilson's real experiences shaped specific elements of Fences.
Wilson grew up in the Hill District of Pittsburgh, the son of an absent white father and a Black mother who held the family together through poverty
The yard, the neighborhood, the specific geography of Black working-class Pittsburgh is not backdrop — it is the world of the play, rendered from inside
Wilson's authority over this material is absolute. He is not depicting a culture; he is transmitting one.
Wilson's own father was absent; he was raised primarily by his mother and stepfather
Both Troy's relationship with his absent biological father (the sharecropper in Alabama) and the consequences of Troy's own failures as a father are shaped by Wilson's lived experience of that gap
Troy is not based on Wilson's father — but the wound of the absent father, and what men do with that wound, is autobiographical territory.
Wilson was deeply influenced by the blues — he described the blues as 'the wellspring of African-American culture' and spent years studying its structures
Troy's speech patterns, his tall tales, his repeated refrains, his way of narrating his own life — all of this is blues structure applied to dramatic dialogue
Fences is not a play about blues music; it is a play written in the idiom of blues music. Understanding that idiom transforms how you hear every scene.
Wilson was accused of plagiarism in school by a teacher who could not believe a Black student had written a 20-page paper
The play's core grievance — that Black achievement is systematically disbelieved, blocked, denied — is not abstract to Wilson
Troy's experience with Major League Baseball is Wilson's experience in school. The specific form differs; the mechanism is identical.
Historical Era
1950s Pittsburgh — post-war labor economy, early Civil Rights era, residential segregation, Negro Leagues in decline
How the Era Shapes the Book
Troy Maxson is a man for whom history arrived too late. The color line in baseball was broken in 1947, when Troy was 43 — past his prime. The Civil Rights Movement is gathering as the play is set, but Troy cannot afford to believe in it. His philosophy — take what's available, don't chase what they'll deny you — was forged in an era when that was the only rational response to white supremacy. The tragedy is that the era is changing faster than Troy can, and his son will inherit his caution in a world that no longer requires it.
Why Fences Matters Historically
Fences won both the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the Tony Award for Best Play in 1987, making August Wilson one of only seven playwrights to win the Pulitzer for drama twice (he won again for The Piano Lesson in 1990). It is widely taught as one of the essential works of American drama and as the most accessible entry point to Wilson's Pittsburgh Cycle — the most ambitious sustained dramatic project in American theatrical history.
- One of the first major American plays to center the interior life of a working-class Black man without making his Blackness the plot — his family relationships, his contradictions, his humanity are the plot
- Established August Wilson as the first Black playwright to win the Pulitzer twice
- Demonstrated that Black vernacular speech could carry the full weight of classical tragedy on the American stage
Challenged in some school districts for language (profanity), sexual content (the affair), and the unflattering portrayal of a Black man — a particular irony given that the play's entire argument is about how Black men are denied the space to be fully, flawed-ly human.