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    A Study Guide for August Wilson's "Seven Guitars"
    A Study Guide for August Wilson's "Seven Guitars"
    A Study Guide for August Wilson's "Seven Guitars"
    Ebook47 pages35 minutes

    A Study Guide for August Wilson's "Seven Guitars"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for August Wilson's "Seven Guitars", excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Drama for Students.This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Drama for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateMay 15, 2018
    ISBN9781410393258
    A Study Guide for August Wilson's "Seven Guitars"

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      A Study Guide for August Wilson's "Seven Guitars" - Gale

      18

      Seven Guitars

      August Wilson

      1995

      Introduction

      Seven Guitars, first performed in 1995, is a play by August Wilson, one of America's foremost playwrights. The play opens and closes with a small gathering after the funeral of its central protagonist, Floyd Schoolboy Barton, a blues guitarist on the cusp of professional success, and concerns the events leading up to his death. His doomed struggle to succeed as a musician, and to win back the love of a woman he abandoned, is interwoven with the lives of this woman and several other friends and acquaintances, which play out in the backyard of a modest boardinghouse in Pittsburgh.

      The play is the fourth part of Wilson's Pittsburgh Cycle, also called his American Century Cycle, a group of ten plays which explore African American life in a Pittsburgh neighborhood. Each play is devoted to a particular decade of the twentieth century, with Seven Guitars set in the 1940s. It features the street-corner speaking style of the Hill District neighborhood where Wilson grew up, a distinctive hallmark of all of his plays, and explores issues of race, relationships, and fate. It won the 1996 New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for Best Play, and it was nominated that year for both the Pulitzer and the Tony for best dramatic production.

      Author Biography

      Wilson Was Born On April 27, 1945, In The Hill District Of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He Was Named Frederick August Kittel Jr. After His Father, A White German Immigrant And Infrequent Presence In The Household. His Mother, Daisy Wilson, An African American, Encouraged All Of Her Children To Read At An Early Age. August Received His First Library Card At The Age Of Five And Read Voraciously, And His Zeal For Words Was Evident Early On, As For Example In A Love Poem He Composed In The Sixth Grade, Cited In The New Yorker: I would I could mend my festering heart / Harpooned by Cupid's flaming dart …

      As a freshman at Central Catholic High School, Wilson remarked in his 2001 interview with the New Yorker, There was a note on my desk every single day. It said, ‘Go home nigger.’ After attending several more schools, Wilson, now fifteen, dropped out and immersed himself in the life and culture of the Hill District's street corners; his observations would later inform much of his writing.

      At eighteen he officially assumed the name August Wilson and dedicated himself to the writer's life, working odd jobs while composing poetry. At twenty-three, influenced by the black nationalist movement, he helped found the Black Horizon Theater in Pittsburgh. His first play, Recycle, was performed in 1973. Five years later, having immersed himself in drama and the work of African American playwrights in particular, he moved to Saint Paul, Minnesota,

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