New biography of theater titan August Wilson

He was a man made of words. And with his words dipped in the lyric pools of blues and jazz, he remade how the world sees Black people.

Playwright August Wilson created dramas such as "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom," "Fences" and "The Piano Lesson" — the last two both winners of the Pulitzer Prize — that stand as an unparalleled magnum opus of Black life in 20^th-century America.

Like novelist Toni Morrison, he lifted the ordinary into the majestic, minting a raft of stars along the way. Viola Davis, Denzel Washington, Angela Bassett, Laurence Fishburne, Courtney Vance and Samuel L. Jackson all had Broadway outings in Wilson plays.

But Wilson, who died at 60 in 2005, has not had a proper biography. Until now.

Patti Hartigan's "August Wilson: A Life" 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.

There's his Black mother, Daisy, stalwart and resourceful as she pushed her smart son to become a lawyer. Instead, he dropped out of high school after a teacher doubted his literary prowess, continuing his education by devouring books at the library.

Hartigan summons Wilson's absent white father, who haunts him, keeping him on a tripwire edge. She gets into Wilson's weed and women, the dissolution of his marriages, including one to Minnesotan Judy Oliver. Born in Pittsburgh, Wilson found his voice in St. Paul.

Hartigan gives his Minnesota years short shrift. Wilson famously said he could hear the voices of his characters better after moving from Pittsburgh, and that when he imagined his plays, he always thought of them at St. Paul's Penumbra Theatre, where he honed his craft with an expert company, steeped in the same aesthetic.

Hartigan's is a sort of literary scrapbook of an American colossus, including how Wilson's life intersected with other luminaries, especially Lloyd Richards, the director and Yale dean who gave him his biggest breaks.

The biographer is expert at finding the right stories to keep us absorbed but "A Life" does not plumb Wilson's depth.

True, he was an autodidact who professed to be writing from "the blood's memory" instead of, say, deep research. But Wilson's work belongs to an intellectual tradition from W.E.B. Du Bois and Alain Locke in the Harlem Renaissance to Amiri Baraka and Larry Neal of the Black Arts Movement.

Wilson's characters are dramatically fleshed out, not stand-ins for tropes and political positions. But some are a part of a larger quest for freedom and self-ownership. Like Ma Rainey, they want control of their creative output. Like Hedley in "Seven Guitars," they are part of a global struggle.

Hartigan glances at these things, failing to contextualize this history and culture.

Like his characters, Wilson sought to own his own story and talents. The knock on his plays was that they were, like him, large and unruly. But he saw that as a metaphor for his own creative genius.

He had too much to say, and too much to do to be contained as a neatly packaged commodity.

August Wilson: A Life

By: Patti Hartigan.

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 544 pages, $32.50.