Suggestions
Use up and down arrows to review and enter to select.Please wait while we process your payment
If you don't see it, please check your spam folder. Sometimes it can end up there.
If you don't see it, please check your spam folder. Sometimes it can end up there.
Please wait while we process your payment
By signing up you agree to our terms and privacy policy.
Don’t have an account? Subscribe now
Create Your Account
Sign up for your FREE 7-day trial
Already have an account? Log in
Your Email
Choose Your Plan
Individual
Group Discount
Save over 50% with a SparkNotes PLUS Annual Plan!
Purchasing SparkNotes PLUS for a group?
Get Annual Plans at a discount when you buy 2 or more!
Price
$24.99 $18.74 /subscription + tax
Subtotal $37.48 + tax
Save 25% on 2-49 accounts
Save 30% on 50-99 accounts
Want 100 or more? Contact us for a customized plan.
Your Plan
Payment Details
Payment Summary
SparkNotes Plus
You'll be billed after your free trial ends.
7-Day Free Trial
Not Applicable
Renews December 12, 2023 December 5, 2023
Discounts (applied to next billing)
DUE NOW
US $0.00
SNPLUSROCKS20 | 20% Discount
This is not a valid promo code.
Discount Code (one code per order)
SparkNotes PLUS Annual Plan - Group Discount
Qty: 00
SparkNotes Plus subscription is $4.99/month or $24.99/year as selected above. The free trial period is the first 7 days of your subscription. TO CANCEL YOUR SUBSCRIPTION AND AVOID BEING CHARGED, YOU MUST CANCEL BEFORE THE END OF THE FREE TRIAL PERIOD. You may cancel your subscription on your Subscription and Billing page or contact Customer Support at custserv@bn.com. Your subscription will continue automatically once the free trial period is over. Free trial is available to new customers only.
Choose Your Plan
For the next 7 days, you'll have access to awesome PLUS stuff like AP English test prep, No Fear Shakespeare translations and audio, a note-taking tool, personalized dashboard, & much more!
You’ve successfully purchased a group discount. Your group members can use the joining link below to redeem their group membership. You'll also receive an email with the link.
Members will be prompted to log in or create an account to redeem their group membership.
Thanks for creating a SparkNotes account! Continue to start your free trial.
Please wait while we process your payment
Your PLUS subscription has expired
Please wait while we process your payment
Please wait while we process your payment
August Wilson was named Frederick August Kittel Jr. when he was born to a German father and an African American mother in 1945. Wilson was born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His father drifted in and out of his family. His mother and a stepfather, David Bedford, mostly raised Wilson. When Wilson was sixteen, he was accused of plagiarism at school when he wrote a sophisticated paper that the administration did not believe he could write. When Wilson's principal would not recognize the validity of Wilson's work, she suspended him and later ignored his attempts to come back to school. Wilson soon dropped out and educated himself at the local library, reading everything he could find.
While working a variety of jobs, Wilson began to write, eventually founding, in 1968, the Black Horizon on the Hill theater company. It was not until 1978, however, when he moved to St. Paul, Minnesota, that Wilson began to produce mature dramas. His first piece, Jitney, a tale of a group of workers and travelers in a taxi station, was well-received locally and praised especially for its experiments in black urban speech. Fullerton Street, however, Wilson's subsequent play, brought no comparable success. Wilson turned to an unfinished project that would prove to be his breakthrough.
Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, which concerns a Black blues singer who takes advantage of a group of musician in a recording studio and their various experiences with racism, eventually brought Wilson to the Yale Reparatory Theater and then to Broadway in 1984. Ma Rainey also enabled Wilson to make contact with Yale Reparatory director Lloyd Richards, who has continued to collaborate with Wilson on his productions. Wilson then wrote his Pulitizer-winning Fences, in which a former star athlete forbids his son from following his path and accepting an athletic scholarship, and Joe Turner's Come and Gone, which tells of an ex-convict's search for his wife upon his release from prison. In 1990, Wilson won his second Pulitzer with The Piano Lesson. His more recent work includes Two Trains Running (1992), which concerns a diner on the verge of being torn down, and Seven Guitars (1995), Wilson's homage to Blues guitarist Floyd Barton.
August Wilson died at the age of 60 in Seattle in 2005, and was buried in his native Pittsburgh.
In Fences as in Wilson's other plays, a tragic character helps pave the way for other Black Americans to have opportunities under conditions they were never free to experience, but never reap from their own sacrifice and talents themselves. This is Troy Maxson's situation. Troy's last name, “Maxson,” is a compressed reference to the Mason-Dixon line, considered as the symbolic line originally conceived of in 1820 to define the separation between the slave states and the free states. Maxson represents an amalgamation of Troy's history in the south and present life in the North that are inextricably linked.
Wilson purposefully sets the play during the season Henry Aaron led the Milwaukee Braves to baseball's World Series title, beating the New York Yankees. When Fences takes place, Black ballplayers like Aaron proved they could not only compete with white players, but that they would be leaders in the professional league. Since we can look back on history with 20/20 hindsight, Wilson asks his audience to put together what they know of American history with the way his various characters experience and perceive history through their own, often conflicted eyes.
Like all of Wilson's plays, Fences takes place in his hometown of Pittsburgh. The Pittsburgh of the Maxson family is a town where Troy and other men of his generation fled from the savage conditions of sharecropping in the South. After Reconstruction failed, many Black Americans in the South walked north as far as they could go to become urban citizens. Having no resources or infrastructure to depend on, men like Bono and Troy found their way in the world by spending years living in shacks, stealing, and in jail.
Wilson clearly draws a linear link between the release of the enslaved people to the disproportionate number of Black men in our jails and in low-income occupations by arguing that the majority of a homeless, resource-less group let loose into a competitive and financed society will have a hard time surviving lawfully. Wilson's characters testify to the fact that the United States failed Black Americans after the Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery and that the government's failure, made effective legally through racist Jim Crow laws and other lawful measures to ensure inequality, continues to effect many Black American lives. Wilson portrays the 1950s as a time when a new world of opportunity for Black Americans began to open up, leaving those like Troy, who grew up in the first half of the century, to feel like strangers in their own land.
Please wait while we process your payment