A Study Guide for August Wilson's "Radio Golf"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for August Wilson's "Radio Golf," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Drama For Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Drama For Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Aug 12, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535831741

Book preview

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Radio Golf

August Wilson

2005

Introduction

August Wilson, playwright and two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, set out early in his career to win a place on America's stages for African American work. Not only did he succeed beyond all doubt—with the majority of his plays completing successful runs on Broadway—but he also brought full casts and crews of black artists along with him, granting them recognition on the best stages in the country. His ten-play cycle chronicling black life over a century in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, broke down barriers in its multicultural appeal, bringing many African Americans into theaters for the first time while inspiring as well as educating white audiences who were already regular theatergoers.

Radio Golf (2005) is the last of these ten plays, set in the economic boom of the late 1990s. Harmond Wilks, a candidate for mayor of Pittsburgh as well as a hopeful redeveloper of the rundown Hill District, must choose between succeeding at the cost of his morality or embracing the community he loves at the cost of his career. Through the play, Wilson urges the increasingly successful black middle and upper classes not to forget those suffering below them, while discouraging assimilation with white society at the expense of black cultural traditions. Radio Golf is a story of ambitions, contradictions, and, ultimately, love—a sweeping morality play complete with musical numbers, monologues, and every emotion in the spectrum—all contained within a single-room real-estate office. Wilson died shortly after this play, the last in the cycle, premiered; his work was, indisputably, complete.

Author Biography

Wilson, born April 27, 1945, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, as Frederick August Kittel, was the son of a black mother descended from slaves and a white German immigrant father, who had no part in his upbringing. At the age of fifteen, Wilson dropped out of high school after he was wrongly accused of plagiarizing a paper on Napoleon that he had passionately researched and written. To avoid telling his mother, who was sure to be heartbroken, Wilson spent his days at the Carnegie Library, reading whatever he pleased. A naturally gifted writer, Wilson at first wanted to become a poet, but was lured into the world of drama by Rob Penny, with whom he formed the Black Horizons Theater Company in 1968.

In 1978, Wilson moved from Pittsburgh to St. Paul, Minnesota, where the