Fences By August Wilson: Play Analysis

According to August Wilson's official website, Wilson was born in 1945 in Pennsylvania; he grew up in impoverished Hill district in Pittsburgh ghetto. As a young man Wilson dedicated himself to become a writer reading works of African Americans such as Langston Hughes and Ralph Ellison. Along with Wilson's professional life, He won two Pulitzer Prizes for Fences (1987), and The Piano Lesson (1990), seven New York Drama Critics Circle Awards, and he received twenty three honorary degrees. Wilson's Pittsburgh Cycle, which collects ten plays that explores the African American experience in the twentieth century, was recognized as one of the significant literary achievements in the American theater. The play Fences is considered as a chronicle play depicts the period of 1957. Wilson argues; "I'm taking each decade and looking at one of the
The Pulitzer Prize winning play Fences, was the third play written in Wilson's Cycle about the struggle of African American men and women during the 1950s. Despite the fact that the 1950s was the start of the Civil Rights movement, in Fences, Wilson does not provide the reader with the notion that the African American Dream lies solely within equality. Rather, August Wilson contrasts the motifs of death and baseball with seeds and growth regarding Troy Maxon the protagonist. In order to convey how the ambition to live out the true American Dream lies within the family. In Fences, August Wilson characterizes Troy Maxon the protagonist as an African American man who has faced adversity all throughout his life. Along with the play there are different conditions in Troy's life. First when he was a young boy, and then a teenager, till he became a grown man. With these age stages, Troy might be described in the light of Merton's theory, as Ritualist, Innovator, Retreatist, and eventually