SOURCE: "Essential Ambiguities in the Plays of August Wilson," in The Hollins Critic, Vol. XXXII, No. 5, December, 1995, pp. 1-12.

In the following essay, Saunders overviews Wilson's life and career in order to illuminate the playwright's use of ambiguȯus and often paradoxical characters, details, and themes in his works.

In a 1984 interview, August Wilson intimated that the "importance of history … is simply to find out who you are and where you've been," a task made all the more difficult for African Americans because of our history of enslavement and subsequent years of slow economic advancement. Even as we struggle to find our place in the mainstream culture, we carry the added burden of color. For Wilson, that burden was further exacerbated because as was the case with James Weldon Johnson's troubled protagonist in The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man (1912), Wilson himself was the offspring of an interracial relationship...