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HOLLYWOOD (CNS) - A star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame will be unveiled Tuesday posthumously honoring Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winning playwright August Wilson.
Denzel Washington, a producer of Netflix's adaptation of Wilson's "The Piano Lesson," and cast member Danielle Deadwyler, are among the scheduled speakers for the 11:30 a.m. ceremony at 1611 Vine St., in front of The Montalbán Theatre.
Wilson's widow, Constanza Romero Wilson, will accept the star.
All Walk of Fame ceremonies are streamed on its website, walkoffame.com, and can later be seen on its YouTube channel, www.youtube.com/@HwdWalkofFame.
The star is the 2,799th since the completion of the Walk of Fame in 1961 with the initial 1,558 stars and the first of 2025.
Wilson is best known for the American Century Cycle, a series of 10 plays, each one set in a different decade of the 20th century. All but one was set in Pittsburgh's Hill District, where Wilson was raised.
Wilson won the first of his two Pulitzer Prizes and lone Tony Award in 1987 for "Fences," about a former Negro Leagues baseball player turned garbage man whose bitterness affects his loved ones.
Wilson's other Pulitzer Prize came in 1990 for "The Piano Lesson," about various members of a Black family in the 1930s who are striving to overcome the past.
Wilson was also a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 1989 for "The Piano Lesson," in 1992 for "Two Trains Running," in 1995 for "Seven Guitars," and in 2000 for "King Hedley II."
According to a biography supplied by the August Wilson African American Cultural Center, Wilson was born Frederick August Kittel Jr. on April 27, 1945 in Pittsburgh, Wilson grew up in the ethnically diverse but impoverished Hill District.
With his German-immigrant father absent throughout his childhood, Wilson was raised by his Black mother, Daisy Wilson, whose surname he would later adopt.
Wilson dropped out of Gladstone High School following unfounded accusations of plagiarism when he was in 10th grade in 1960, then worked a series of odd jobs while continuing his informal education with trips to Pittsburgh's Carnegie Library, where he read the works of Richard Wright, Langston Hughes and Ralph Ellison.
Following a short enlistment in the Army in 1962, Wilson returned to working a series of menial jobs.
In 1965, Wilson purchased his first typewriter for $20, and began to write poetry, inspired by the authors whose works he encountered during his trips to the public library. He passed time in coffee shops and cigar stores, observing the lives and voices of people he encountered in the Hill District, often recording his thoughts on cocktail napkins and later using these notes to create the personalities of the characters in his plays.
Inspired by the Black Power movement of the late 1960s, Wilson joined a group of poets, educators and artists who formed the Centre Avenue Poets Theater Workshop, through which he met Rob Penny. In 1968, they co-founded the Black Horizons Theater, a community-based theater company in the Hill District.
Wilson served as the director and occasional actor, and Penny was the playwright-in-residence until the mid-1970s when the company dissolved.
Wilson moved to St. Paul, Minnesota in 1978 at the invitation of his friend Claude Purdy, a co-founder of the Penumbra Theater, Wilson further concentrated on playwriting.
Wilson's first professional production was "Black Bart and the Sacred Hills," a 1977 play inspired by an outlaw who poems at the scene of his crimes.
Wilson began writing "Jitney," in 1979, set in a worn-down gypsy cab station in Pittsburgh in early autumn 1977. It was first produced at the Allegheny Repertory Theatre in Pittsburgh in 1982. After being rewritten, it had an off-Broadway run in 2000 and at London's Lyttelton Theatre in 2001, receiving an Olivier Award, London's version of the Tony Awards, for play of the year in 2002.
"Jitney" is considered the first play in the first play in the American Century Cycle.
Wilson was inducted into the American Theatre Hall of Fame in 2006.
Wilson died on Oct. 2, 2005, of liver cancer at age 60.
