The Piano Lesson
August Wilson (1987)
“A piano carved with the faces of slaves sits in a Pittsburgh living room — and whether to sell it or keep it may be the most important argument two siblings ever have.”
About August Wilson
August Wilson (1945-2005) grew up in the Hill District of Pittsburgh — the neighborhood where all ten plays of his Pittsburgh Cycle (also called the Century Cycle) are set. He was born Frederick August Kittel, the son of a Black mother and a white German father who was largely absent. He dropped out of school at fifteen after a teacher accused him of plagiarizing a paper because it was too good. He educated himself in the Carnegie Library. He began writing poetry and plays in earnest in the 1960s and 1970s, absorbing the blues tradition and the Black nationalist literary movement. The Piano Lesson was his fourth produced play in the Cycle; it won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1990. Wilson intended each of the ten plays to document a decade of Black American life in the twentieth century — The Piano Lesson covers the 1930s.
Life → Text Connections
How August Wilson's real experiences shaped specific elements of The Piano Lesson.
Wilson grew up in the Hill District in a house where family history was oral — no written records, stories told by elders
The piano as the family's only physical archive of their ancestors; Doaker's oral narration as the only way the family knows its history
The play's entire premise — that an object can be an archive — comes from Wilson's own formation in a community where oral tradition was the primary mode of historical transmission.
Wilson was shaped by the blues as a philosophical and aesthetic framework — he called it the 'wellspring of African-American culture'
The piano as blues instrument; Wining Boy's playing; the blues structure underlying all of Wilson's dialogue rhythms
The play is not just about a piano — it is about what the blues represents as a way of processing suffering through form, of transforming pain into something that can be shared.
Wilson's own family navigated the tension between assimilation into northern Black middle-class life and the Mississippi Delta roots of the previous generation
Berniece's northern composure vs. Boy Willie's southern energy; the debate about whether to sell (modernize, move forward) or keep (honor, preserve, remain connected)
The piano argument IS the argument Wilson grew up hearing about identity and history among Black Americans — whether to face the past or leave it behind.
Wilson received no formal literary education — his literary tradition came from the Black oral and musical tradition, not the Western canon
The play's rejection of Western dramatic resolution in favor of ritual and incantation; Avery's Christian rite failing while Berniece's ancestral invocation succeeds
Wilson is writing from inside a tradition that Western critics sometimes miss: the play's resolution is not irrational but differently rational — it operates by the logic of the blues and the ancestral, not by the logic of the realistic problem play.
Historical Era
1936 Pittsburgh / The Great Migration / The Depression
How the Era Shapes the Book
The 1936 setting is chosen precisely because it sits at the midpoint of the Great Migration — the Charles family has already made the move North, but Mississippi is still present and immediate. Boy Willie's watermelon truck, his scheme for buying Sutter's land, his speech patterns — all mark him as someone who has not yet fully relocated. Berniece has. The Depression means that the piano's monetary value is real and urgent: selling it would actually change the family's material conditions. Wilson does not let the play be merely symbolic — the economic stakes are genuine.