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August Wilson Society President's Foreword to 
Inaugural Issue of the  
August Wilson Journal 

 
By Sandra G. Shannon 

Professor Emerita, Howard University 

              

The release of the much-anticipated inaugural issue of the 
August Wilson Journal is yet another indicator that the 
journal’s namesake, the two-time Pulitzer-prize-winning 
playwright August Wilson, belongs to the ages.   

− Sandra G. Shannon 

Abstract  
Founder and President of the August Wilson Society reflects upon the growth of the field of August 
Wilson studies over the past several decades and points towards a promising future. 
 

Keywords 
August Wilson, Sandra Shannon, Alan Nadel, The Dramatic Vision of August Wilson, Robert Brustein, August 

Wilson Journal, The Ground on Which I Stand, The August Wilson Society, Michael Downing, David Anderson 

I discovered in the late 1980s that August Wilson was a playwright to watch.  
Approximately ten years later after immersing myself in extant—though limited—
scholarship on his work, I had no doubt that his plays must be required reading and that no 

self-respecting high school or college curricula could afford to ignore 
his work.  Buoyed by these certainties, I sought to make Wilson’s canon 
as familiar and as accessible in academe as that of Shakespeare, to 
facilitate widespread and serious study of his plays, and to serve as a 
catalyst for a much-needed body of scholarship on this major American 
playwright.  I was soon to discover that work toward these ambitious 
goals was daunting as I perused shelves, newspaper clippings, and 
databases and as I followed leads to secure key interviews and travel to 
sites that promised additional material to support my first book, The 
Dramatic Vision of August Wilson (Howard UP, 1995). 1

Although my early-to-mid-1990s search for sources on Wilson continued to be 
arduous, I soon detected a slow-but-steady uptick in serious treatment of what is now 
known as the American Century Cycle.  In 1994, I expressed a mixture of cautious optimism 
and alarm in my “Annotated Bibliography of Works by and about August Wilson,” which 
appeared in Alan Nadel’s seminal collection, May All Your Fences Have Gates: Essays on the 
Drama of August Wilson (Iowa UP). 

  I persevered. 

2  “Critical assessment of August Wilson’s plays has 

Sandra Shannon 



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increased in scope and in momentum over the last decade,” I touted in the brief 
introduction to my thirty-six-page project.  I went on to note the following: 

Although he wrote his first play in 1973 (Recycle), serious attention to his work did 
not come until the early 1980s with the Broadway success of Ma Rainey’s Black 
Bottom (1981).  Now, Wilson is one of the most-written-about dramatists in 
America, capturing the respect and admiration of some of New York’s toughest 
critics and inspiring a well-spring of scholarly activity about the plays that make up 
his proposed ten-play chronicle of the black experience.  Published commentary on 
his work has likewise evolved from an abundance of theatre reviews of works staged 
along a familiar path from the Yale Repertory Theatre to Broadway . . . Extensive 
though it may be, this annotated bibliography is not all-inclusive; it is instead 
intended as a starting place for anyone doing preliminary research on August 
Wilson. 3

What began some thirty years ago as an overly ambitious agenda on my part has 
now evolved into a full-fledged formal enterprise!   The release of the much-anticipated 
inaugural issue of the August Wilson Journal is yet another indicator that the journal’s 
namesake, the two-time Pulitzer-prize-winning playwright August Wilson, belongs to the 
ages.  Unlike many of his fellow playwrights, Wilson famously read a lot of what theatre 
critics (including his nemesis, New Republic critic Robert Brustein) had to say about his 
earlier staged performances.  Some of their reviews hit below the belt.  Some showed blatant 
cultural insensitivity, racial bias, and ignorance. Fortunately, an appreciable number of 
reviews provided astute, objective observations and judiciously pointed out both strengths 
and weaknesses in the performance and, at times, called attention to perceived flaws within 
the playwriting itself.  The seemingly misguided tenor adopted early on by theatre reviewers 
led Wilson to single out critics per se in his well-publicized 1996 speech, “The Ground On 
Which I Stand” speech, where he writes, “As playwrights grow and develop, as the theatre 
changes, the critic has an important responsibility to guide and encourage that growth . . . It 
is the critic who should be in forefront of developing new tools for analysis necessary to 
understand new influences. 

 

4

While Wilson’s high-profile pronouncements originally targeted critics of staged 
performances of his work, they may also stand as ongoing reminders to today’s scholars who 
aspire to publish research on his body of dramatic literature.  The August Wilson Journal 
proudly accepts Wilson’s nearly 25-year-old charge to critics by creating a publishing home 
for continued growth and excellence in scholarship in August Wilson Studies.  On behalf of 
the August Wilson Society and as its President, I congratulate the founders of the August 
Wilson Journal, Michael Downing and David Anderson, and pledge our support in making it 
into a premiere, world-class publication. 

  

Author Bio 

Dr. Sandra Shannon is Professor Emerita at Howard University.  She has published 
numerous books and essays on August Wilson and is the Founder and President of the 
August Wilson Society. 



S H A N N O N : P R E S I D E N T  O F  T H E  A U G U S T  W I L S O N  S O C I E T Y ' S  
F O R E W A R D  T O  I N A U G U R A L  I S S U E  O F  T H E  A U G U S T  W I L S O N  

J O U R N A L   
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Notes 

 
1 Sandra Shannon. The Dramatic Vision of August Wilson. Howard UP, 1995. 
  
2 Alan Nadel.  May All Your Fences Have Gates:  Essays on the Drama of August Wilson. 

Iowa UP, 1994, p. 230. 
 
3 Ibid, 230. 
 
4 August Wilson. The Ground On Which I Stand.  Theatre Communications Group, 

1996, 43-44.  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 Articles in this journal are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. 

 This journal is published by the University Library System of the University of Pittsburgh as part of its  
D-Scribe Digital Publishing Program and is cosponsored by the University of Pittsburgh Press. 

 

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	Abstract
	Keywords

	Author Bio

