The first authoritative biography of August Wilson, who wrote a series of ten plays celebrating African American life in the 20th century, one play for each decade.
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.
