It wasn't easy for Frederick August Kittel Jr., a high school dropout from Pittsburgh's Hill District, to transform himself into August Wilson, the venerable playwright whose 10-play cycle examining 20th century Black life in America earned him a seat in the pantheon beside Eugene O'Neill, Arthur Mi
August Wilson, the late Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright who chronicled the Black experience in America, gets a stirring biography from Patti Hartigan.
This week, the editors feature “Romare Bearden Sees in a Memory,” an essay by Myron Schwartzman, author of Romare Bearden: His Life and Art (1990), that appeared in the magazine in May 1984. “Battle Lines,” scholar Michael Lobel’s essay on the artist’s work in the 1930s, appears in Artforum’s current issue.When Schwartzman wrote “Romare Bearden Sees in a Memory,” Bearden himself was sixty-nine years old and widely celebrated for his singular style. “On the one hand,” Schwartzman observes, “he absorbed the legacy of the Cubists, Matisse, and Mondrian, and had established his reputation as a