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August Wilson helps library turn 100
Saturday, March 20, 1999 By Christopher Rawson, Post-Gazette Drama Critic
Pittsburgh's favorite playwright and native son was back in his old haunts Thursday, helping the Hill District branch of the Carnegie Library kick off its centennial year.
August Wilson is based in Seattle, now, but his plays take him all over the country and his heart, family and friends regularly bring him back to Pittsburgh.
Just now, he's here for a few weeks, working on his new play, "King Hedley II," which will debut at the Pittsburgh Public Theater in late fall, and having a look at "Fences," now in rehearsal.
Thursday he took time out to acknowledge a debt.
"I got my first library card from the Hill District branch of the Carnegie Library on Wylie Avenue in 1950. Labor historians do not speak well of Andrew Carnegie . . . [but he] will forever be for me that man who made it all possible for me to be standing here today."
In his speech, written with his characteristic rhythmic eloquence and fervor, Wilson told the library lovers who packed the busy branch, which is now on Dinwiddie Street, how books shaped his life.
He learned to love books first from his mother. Then, at 14, "I walked into the Hazelwood branch on my way home from Louis Field with my basketball under my arm and changed my life: I discovered the Negro section with its 30 or so books . . . [and that] it was possible to be a writer."
Wilson recalled how he dropped out of school at age 15 because a teacher refused to believe he had written a 20-page paper:
"I dropped out of school, but I didn't drop out of life. I would leave the house each morning and go to the main branch of the Carnegie Library in Oakland where they had all the books in the world. . . . I felt liberated from the constraints of a curriculum that labored through one book in eight months."
The rest of his education came, he said, from the knowledgeable, passionate people he discovered on the streets of the Hill - but books provided the maps.
"Every conceivable facet of life was mapped out and handed to us . . . [but] our children know nothing about them. It's hard to follow the maps and kill somebody over $15 worth of narcotics. . . . Everything on the maps says human life is valued higher than that."
The evening was a community celebration. Herb Elish and Lydia Scott, heads of the Carnegie Library and the Hill branch, offered greetings. Richard Wilson sang a song of welcome to Horace Turner's keyboard. Councilman Sala Udin reminisced about early days with Wilson on the Hill.
After Wilson's talk, everyone had a chance to share their enthusiasms with him, take pictures and get an autograph.
As the ebullient reception stretched into the evening, books stood silent all around, eloquent witness to both past and future.
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