Fences by August Wilson, Paperback | Barnes & Noble

Overview

Soon to be a Major Motion Picture starring Denzel Washington and Viola Davis

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the Tony Award for Best Play

"In his work, Mr. Wilson depicted the struggles of black Americans with uncommon lyrical richness, theatrical density and emotional heft, in plays that give vivid voices to people on the frayed margins of life."The New York Times

From August Wilson, author of The Piano Lesson and the 1984-85 Broadway season's best play, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, is another powerful, stunning dramatic work that has won him numerous critical acclaim including the 1987 Tony Award for Best Play and the Pulitzer Prize. The protagonist of Fences (part of Wilsons ten-part Pittsburgh Cycle plays), Troy Maxson, is a strong man, a hard man. He has had to be to survive. Troy Maxson has gone through life in an America where to be proud and black is to face pressures that could crush a man, body and soul. But the 1950s are yielding to the new spirit of liberation in the 1960s, a spirit that is changing the world Troy Maxson has learned to deal with the only way he can, a spirit that is making him a stranger, angry and afraid, in a world he never knew and to a wife and son he understands less and less.

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From the Publisher

"Fences leaves no doubt that Mr. Wilson is a major writer, combining a poet's ear for vernacular with a robust sense of humor, a sure sense for crackling dramatic incident, and a passionate commitment to a great subject."The New York Times "A blockbuster piece of theater, a major American play."New York Daily News

"An eloquent play... a comedy-drama that is well-nigh flawless."New York Magazine "A moving story line and a hero almost Shakespearian in contour."The Wall Street Journal

"A work of tremendous impact that summons up gratitude for the beauty of its language, the truth of its character, the power of its portrayals."Chicago Tribune

Sacred Fire

Troy Maxson is an angry man. He is an embittered ex-con who has built inner fences around his emotions that no oneneither his son Gory, his wife, Rosa Lee, nor his best friend, Jimcan cross. A proud and bitter man who was prevented by racism from playing major league baseball, Maxson is at fifty- three years of age a garbage collector. While his job allows him to successfully provide for his family, handling garbage represents for him a grim metaphor of his life. As he did during a bit in prison, he once again feels confined, and those who love him most, who depend on him most, suffer most for it.

Through Troy Maxson, playwright August Wilson personifies the man who grew up during the heat of Jim Crow: first proud, hopeful, and passionate in expectation; then emotionally withdrawn and disillusioned from incessant battles with life. Wilson also masterfully illuminates both the strength that lies within community and the adverse impact of a psychology of inequality that devastates the African American male and, in turn, his family and relationships, potentially disintegrating that same community.

Wilson's Pulitzer Prizewinning play offers a bleak picture of what happens to black males when their aspirations go beyond the fences within which they are confined. The fences of a racist society are compounded by the fences black men have often created to ward off loved ones who remind them of their failures. These fences only harbor. pain and hasten an inevitable asphyxiation. Fences is a gripping portrait of a black man dying.

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August Wilson was a major American playwright whose work has been consistently acclaimed as among the finest of the American theater. His first play, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for best new play of 1984-85. His second play, Fences, won numerous awards for best play of the year, 1987, including the Tony Award, the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award, the Drama Desk Award, and the Pulitzer Prize. Joe Turner's Come and Gone, his third play, was voted best play of 1987-1988 by the New York Drama Critics' Circle. In 1990, Wilson was awarded his second Pulitzer Prize for The Piano Lesson. He died in 2005.

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Fences by August Wilson, Paperback | Barnes & Noble