The Piano Lesson

August Wilson was born in 1945 in the Hill District of Pittsburgh, the predominantly Black and immigrant neighborhood where most of his plays are set. His mother, Daisy Wilson, was a Black woman who worked as a domestic cleaner. Wilson was named Frederick August Kittel after his father, Frederick Kittel, a white German immigrant and pastry chef. Kittel was violent and had an alcohol addiction; he abandoned his family when Wilson was five, leaving his mother to raise him and his six siblings alone. In 1958, his mother remarried David Bedford, a working-class Black man who was much more of a role model and father. They moved to the mostly white suburbs, where they were targeted for racist harassment that forced them out of one home. Wilson was intelligent, but school was a series of struggles. He left one school due to racist bullying. At the next, he was bored. At the third, in 1960, a teacher failed a paper Wilson wrote for history class, alleging that he plagiarized it. Wilson left that day and dropped out at age 15. To hide this from his mother, he would leave for school each day and go to the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, where he read and educated himself.