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.”
Why This Book Matters
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.
Firsts & Innovations
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
Cultural Impact
The 2016 film adaptation with Denzel Washington and Viola Davis brought the play to a mass audience; Davis won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress
Regularly appears on AP English Literature examinations — one of the most commonly assigned dramatic texts in American high schools
The Pittsburgh Cycle (Ten plays, one per decade of the 20th century Black experience) is considered the American theater's equivalent of the history plays of Shakespeare
Wilson's articulation of the 'fences' metaphor has entered cultural discourse as a description of the internalized barriers of systemic racism
Troy Maxson is frequently cited alongside Willy Loman as one of the defining tragic protagonists of American drama
Banned & Challenged
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.