THE PLAY Sonoma Valley High School（索诺玛山谷高中）.pdf

AUGUST WILSON (b. 1945) was born in a slum in Pittsburgh and raised with his five brothers and sisters by his African American mother, Daisy Wilson, who supported her children by working as a janitor downtown in the county courthouse. His father, a white man, abandoned the family; Wilson remembered that he was a sporadic presence in our house. Wilson was also nurtured by his stepfather, David Bedford, who worked in the city sewer department. Bedford had been a football star in high school but spent twenty- three years in prison after killing a man in a robbery attempt. Wilson credits his mother for teaching him about black pride. He tells a story about the time she won a brand-new Speed Queen washing machine in a radio competition. When the station discovered she was black, they substituted a certificate for a secondhand washer. Wilsons mother was doing her familys laundry at the sink in her home on a scrub board, but she refused the radios offer rather than be treated so unfairly. At age fifteen, Wilson dropped out of school, took a job running a freight elevator, and began to spend hours in the Negro Section of the Pittsburgh Public Library, where he read Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes, and James Baldwin. Back in Pittsburgh after three years in the army, he bought his first typewriter for twenty dollars and began to write poetry before gradually shifting over, on the advice of a friend, to writing plays. Wilson later told interviewer Will Haygood that what pained him enough to start his writing was the idea of African Americans streaming out of the South, trying to forget their past: My mother came from North Carolina. And all my friends were always from someplace: Alabama, Georgia. And this is what happened invariably: One of my classmates would come to school and say, My grandmother died. And we got some land. Id say, When you gonna move? The