Masterful ... With painstaking research, stylistic verve, and an eye both admiring and exacting, Ms. Hartigan has pieced together the man behind the 20th Century Cycle, bringing Wilson to furious, complicated life ... Ms. Hartigan documents with a great sense of the dramatic ... Narrated brilliantly.
An invaluable and highly absorbing new biography ... Hartigan’s biography is at its best in chronicling the artistic process that reshaped not only Wilson as a dramatist but also the producing structures of the American theater ... Wilson’s artistic story, throbbing with the ancestral memory Wilson felt in his blood, is profoundly inspiring in Hartigan’s magnificent rendering.
[Hartigan's] book is an achievement: It’s solid and well reported. But it’s dutiful. It lacks ebullience and critical insight. The writing is slack and, by the second half, the clichés are falling so heavily you need a hat ... This book couldn’t have been easy to write ... Hartigan is adept at keeping the lines straight ... An imperfect book.
While Wilson enjoyed mythologizing his own life, this glowing biography sifts fact from fiction. Wilson was always a poet; his last words to his daughter were, 'It is beautiful. It is beautiful.' As is this invaluable biography.
There probably won’t be a better-written biography of the great playwright August Wilson (1945–2005) than theater critic Hartigan’s remarkable book ... Brilliant.
...engagingly traces his family history from slavery onward, giving us a play-by-play of Wilson's artistic growth and the prickly restlessness that roiled his soul. A former theater critic at the Boston Globe, Hartigan writes in a breezy, chatty style; her book is chock full of vignettes and anecdotes. A Life is absorbing as she gives us his genetic, literary and spiritual provenance ... The biographer is expert at finding the right stories to keep us absorbed but A Life does not plumb Wilson's depth.
...riveting ... Hartigan’s book is the first to examine in depth how this high school dropout, raised by a single mother, went on to become a startlingly fresh, even essential voice in the theatre. Hartigan explores Wilson’s sprawling oeuvre and traces how his work integrated the complexities of his life, his poetic sensibility, and his commitment to authenticating Black experiences onstage ... Hartigan provides plenty of backstage anecdotes and private dramas, but keeps Wilson’s creative hardships, growth, and accomplishments front and center ... Above all, Hartigan affirms what Wilson was after, and achieved to a degree which still seems miraculous: a body of work that stands with the best of world literature, for the theatre or otherwise. Hartigan, with this first comprehensive biography, has honored Wilson in the way he deserves.
