We are thrilled to share Jerrell Gibbs’ portrait of the legendary playwright August Wilson, made exclusively for T magazine to accompany the essay on his work in the December issue.
“There’s perhaps no other playwright who has asserted the richness and complexity of everyday Black lives and language so deeply as August Wilson. Until he arrived, the American stage has been largely imagined as the nearly exclusive realm of white male writers such as Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, and Eugene O’Neill, all of whom explored the limitations and failures of the American dream. But where their domestic dramas concern themselves with a class-based, Gatsby-influenced version of bootsrapism, Wilson’s plays offer a more complex vision of that same dream: one that reflects the challenges of social mobility and its unique racial limitations."
